"What do they live on?" "Fish, mostly, together with roots and berries; and they can get all they want with bow and arrow, or with a stone. They can throw a stone as straight as you could shoot a bullet." "We ought to import some of them for baseball pitchers," suggested Hamilton with a grin. "But it really must have been an awful job enumerating them. And when it comes to poisoned arrows!--No thank you, I'd rather stick to old Kentucky. Are there many of them?" "No," was the reply, "the Negrito is dying out, just as the aboriginal tribes all over the world are doing. There are only about twenty-three thousand of the Pygmies left now." "But there are more natives than that in the Philippines?" queried the boy. "Hundreds of thousands. You see there are really three different types of savages in the Philippines, according to the census reports. The aboriginal tribes are the Negritos, perhaps as close to primitive man as any people on earth; those are the ones I have been telling you about, and they are a race all to themselves, as different from the rest of the Filipinos as the negro is from the white man. The true Filipinos are Malays." "Even the head-hunters?" "Certainly. There are Filipinos of two grades,--apparently of two periods of migration. The first came and settled the islands away a long time back, driving the Pygmies to the forests, and occupying the coasts themselves. These tribes, the Igorots, the Ilongots, the Bilans, and so forth, are of the same general type as the head-hunters of Borneo, and some,--like the Ilongots--to this day carry out the savage custom that 'no young man can be accepted in marriage until he has presented his bride with a human head.'" "That is certainly savage," Hamilton agreed; "one never thinks that sort of thing can be going on still, and certainly not under the American flag!" "It is, though," the Porto Rican replied. "The third group," he continued, "the Moros and so forth, are all Mohammedans, and they seem to have come to the islands after the semi-civilization of the Malay archipelago and its submission to Mohammedanism. The Moros are haughty and assume the air of conquerors. As the Igorots drove the Negritos to the forest and thence to the wild interior, so the Moros drove the Igorots. They are largely pure Malay, warlike and cruel, but shrewd and capable of culture. They assume an over-lordship over all other tribes and their Dattos can generally enforce it." "It seems strange," the boy said, "to think of going among those savages and asking them the same questions that United States citizens were asked, writing the answers on the same kind of schedules, and counting these ferocious head-hunters on a tabulating machine."