As an ethnologist, he was an honored member of the leading ethnological societies of Europe, and his close friendship with Blumentritt we have noted. Dr. Meyer, director of the Royal Saxony Ethnographical Institute of Dresden, regarded him with admiration as a great scholar and great investigator. With Meyer and with Virchow he was on terms of confidential intimacy. These were men in whom ordinarily confidence was a plant of slow growth. They were drawn to and believed in Rizal because he had mastered their specialty and could meet them in it on their own footing. All those rare and abstruse works of Müller, Perschel, Ratzel, and the other great leaders in ethnological research he knew well [180] and, what was better, he had ideas of his own about them. Not only then but long before; he had been mulling over ethnological principles while he was teaching Filipino boys at the Ateneo the best way to land on the solar plexus of a young Spanish bully. As a naturalist he enriched the museums of Europe and Manila with hundreds of specimens of his gathering and preparing. Flowers, plants, crustaceans and all forms of animal life attracted his study. The German museums were so well pleased with his work that they offered him, while he was in Dapitan, a remunerative salary to devote himself entirely to gathering specimens for them, and they still exhibit his collections among their most valued possessions. Three creatures, previously unknown to science, now bear his name because he discovered them. One is a frog called the Rhacoperus Rizali; the second is a coleopter called the Apogonis Rizali; and the third, a dragon called the Draco Rizali. In philology, Rizal won the friendship and esteem of Dr. Reinhold Rost, said to have been the greatest philologist of the nineteenth century, and was himself one of its most wonderful polyglots. While he was at Dapitan, to baffle the censor, he wrote a letter to his sister that he began in colloquial German, carried on in colloquial English, and concluded in colloquial French. [181] But this was for him a most trifling exploit and hardly worth noticing. Besides these and Spanish, of which he was a master, he spoke Latin, Greek, Arab, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Swedish, Dutch, Catalan, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, Visayan, and the Moro dialects of Dapitan. One of his papers, a scientific treatise on the Visayan language, was read before the Ethnographical Society of Berlin. He was associated with Dr. Meyer and Dr. Blumentritt in the annotation of a Chinese codicil of the Middle Ages. While at Dapitan he began to write a scientific Tagalog grammar and a treatise on the resemblances between Tagalog and Visayan speech. To amuse himself he would sometimes adorn a title-page or drawing with quotations in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Japanese, Spanish, and English.