The first of these was a lighting system for Dapitan; the next, waterworks, which he devised, planned, and superintended in person, going back to the engineering lore he had learned at the Ateneo and then laid aside. Much of the construction was difficult, and engineers still wonder at the skill and courage he showed in meeting its problems. He and his workmen were without the proper tools; they must improvise their own materials, and bring the water a long distance over valleys and around hills; but they conquered every obstacle. [179] When this task was done he bought him a tract of land close by the town, built a house on it, and established there adequate quarters for his school. This may be a good place to say what this singular person was in some of the sciences to which he gave so much of himself. As a physician, while still a student at Madrid University, he had made commentaries of remarkable merit, “Apuntes de Obstetricia” and “Apuntes Clinicos.” As an ophthalmologist he seemed to win at once to distinction as soon as he left the university. This Dr. de Weckert of Paris, to whom he went first, was of too great repute and too well supplied with candidates to have selected him for chief laboratory assistant if he had not been of unusual attainments. It appears that de Weckert was so much impressed with this brown man from Malaya that they began a warm friendship that lasted until Rizal’s death, and so long as he remained in Paris he was the great oculist’s favorite companion and collaborateur. In Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Berlin he was the associate and assistant of men like Galezowsky and Schulzer. In the few months that elapsed between his first return to the Philippines and his departure thence at the veiled order of Terrero, he received in fees more than five thousand pesos, a sum equivalent to about fifteen thousand pesos of the present day. At Hong-Kong, for the short time he was there, his office was overrun with patients from all that part of the world. As we have seen, they followed him even to far Dapitan. One of them was an Englishman that made him a present of five hundred pesos, brown man and Malay as he was.