Referring here to class-books in the Philippines, where from the earliest years of the conquest every pueblo had its school of primary instruction, it will not be irrelevant to point out the fact very stoutly that though education (as admitted by well-nigh every chronicler) was primitive in character,--and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where was it not? yet the course of instruction given in the common schools of bamboo-thatch was (as results amply testify) deep and solid enough for the intellectual calibre of the people. Since, so far as known, Malaysia, however saintly, heroic, innocent, the same as our own aborigines, albeit now civilized for three centuries and upwards, has, despite the heartiest aid in teachers and funds, fairly lavished on them by Church and state, turned out no man of shining mark, no scholar, no artist, no genius in statecraft or commerce. The first college-institution with pretensions to higher courses of intellectual training was opened (formally at least) by the Jesuits in 1601, less than half a century, that is, after the arrival of Europeans in Luzon. In regard to common Indian schools, so zealously guarded by the Leyes de las Indias, I have picked up here and there from old-time chroniclers scraps of many ordinances passed by the crown relative to their foundation and conduct. Among them the following bits of quaint old-fashioned oversight of the dominies in charge. Thus, in 1754, I have read that each maestro of a mission-school was to get, in lieu of support, "a peso and one caban--a measure--of rice a month." (A caban was equal to 75 litres, about the same number of quarts, English.) Again, every mission-priest was called upon to supply (free to his pupils) "paper and ink." Moreover, as early as the beginning of the century just closing, in 1817, it was ordained that boys' schools were to be kept on the ground-floor of the mission-house; while the girls were to be taught at their mistress' home. (Malaysia--thus it was ordained--was not to experiment with the "co-educational theory.") Now for the promised works of chief authority on Philippine linguistics,--monuments of the various dialects of that archipelago, that, along with their purely technical value to the student of idioms, will be acknowledged as useful to scholars in even far different lines of intellectual play.