And,--I feel that attention shall be called thereto, first because the subject itself is deeply interesting to lovers especially of folk-lore, then again, because commonly much misunderstood,--in one of his appendices to Zúñiga (ii *66-*83), Retana has reproduced some twenty-five pages of a Pangasinán Charm Book, covered with strange words--jumbles, most of them, of mutilated Church Latin, with crosses and queer-looking symbols. This charm-book in MS. (as are all its fellows), whereof copies without count are circulated among the lowest, most superstitious classes of islanders--Indians and meztizos, that is, Spaniard, or Chinese, mixed with native,--is wont to be worn around the neck, in the disguise of a Catholic scapular, as safeguard to the wearer against perils of any kind, chiefly the knife, or bullet, of his enemy. Again,--I am quoting Retana, who gives his own personal experiences in Luzon,--so jealously and closely (he says) do these Indian charm-bearers guard their secret heathenish practice from their missionaries, who, for ages, albeit not always with good result, have been striving to detach their wards from such superstitious usages, that the same scholar and curio-hunter, despite his keenest research in Luzon, has never been able to catch even a glimpse but of three of these pagan scapularies, the ones shown to him by a Dominican missionary, Father Casimiro Lafuente, for many years cure at the pueblo of Santa Barbara, in Pangasinán, now (1893) a member of the house of his brotherhood at Avila, in Spain. Moreover, it appears, from the same Retana, that Father Lafuente, so many years resident in the islands, had never succeeded in unearthing other scapularies than these self-same three. Many other forms of heathenism, some of them not even yet wholly banned from the Philippines, the reader will find described in another of Retana's works--de Aniterías (Madrid, 1894). Zúñiga also tells all worth knowing of the abominable rites practised among Luzonians,--of their Nonos, Duendes, the Pag-Papasipin, Tigbalag, Patianac, Bongsol, and Bilao. Much of what he says regarding the attachment of these peoples to unclean and impious ceremonies he has gathered from that rarest of books--one copy only believed to be extant, at the colonial museum of the Augustinians at Valladolid (in Spain), the Práctica (Manila, 1731), of Father Tomás Ortiz, one-time missionary of that brotherhood in China, then for thirty years resident in Luzon, where he died in 1742. Better, however, consult Zúñiga himself, [8] and the notes thereon by Retana, who singularly has failed to insert Ortiz' Práctica in his Biblioteca, and you will find much of interest;--among other things about tattooing, common practice at one time among all Polynesians, the same as among our own aborigines, until taught more refined ways by Christian missionaries; and about wakes too,--solemn ceremonials of grief, with banquetting and chants--on the occasion of the death of kindred. [9]