The reason for the omission of these titles in Retana's later bibliography, that otherwise would seem unaccountable, is perhaps a doubt as to their genuinity. But why he should fail to mention this flaw in their line of ancestral title, is like many another perplexing problem that the scholar is apt to encounter in his wanderings through the shadowy, albeit delightful and fascinating realm of letters. We now pass on to the question of the introduction of the press into the Philippines. V. INTRODUCTION OF PRINTING INTO THE PHILIPPINES. As regards the introduction of printing itself into that archipelago, wherein (as writers agree) the first press was set to work in the opening years of the seventeenth century, yet there is dispute as to two points,--the precise date, namely, when the printing-press was first established there, and the country whence it was carried to those islands. Though in his Biblioteca Retana inferentially states that the Spanish-Japanese Dictionary of 1630 was the earliest Philippine imprint, yet in another work of a few years ahead, one of his numerous valuable appendices to Zúñiga's Travels, [20] the same author has maintained, rightly and soundly enough it would seem, a wholly different opinion. There he reproduces the title-page of a work printed twenty years earlier, in 1610, which he himself saw in the Museo Biblioteca de Ultramar, whereof the title (he declares) is as follows: Arte y Reglas | de la Lengua | Tagala. | Por el Padre. F. Fray Francisco de. S. Joseph de la | Orde de. S. Domingo Predicador General en la Prouincia | de. N. Señora del Rosario de las Islas Filipinas. | [Here the Grand Seal of the Dominican Order (in wood) with this legend:] | Mihi avtem ab | sit glorianisi incruce Dñi Ñri IESVXPIAD--| GAL. 6. | | En el Partido de Bataan | galo, Año de 1610. | Substantially the aforesaid title means that the book--a Tagal grammar--was composed by Father Francisco de S. Joseph (whose family-name (as otherwise known) was Blancas), of the Dominican Order, preacher-general of his province of Our Lady of the Rosary in the Philippines, and printed at Bataan, A.D. 1610. [21] In one of his Appendices to Zúñiga, [22] Retana affirms that the printer of this Arte was the Tagal Tomás Pinpin. Why, then, with this sample of early Philippine typography before his eyes, presumably yet extant on the shelves of the Museo de Ultramar, Retana (whose interesting description of Blancas' Arte of 1610 will shortly follow) should have deemed it right to omit all mention of it in his latest bibliography, wherein, so far as I can read, there is not the slightest reference to it, seems truly a literary conundrum--one that, for me at least, baffles all power of solution.