Because of the tender age of these boys, since they enter at the age of six or eight years, and remain until that of fourteen, they are not permitted, except in rare exceptions, to play wind instruments. The gain due to this institution is public and well known to all who have heard the harmony produced by those sopranos in the churches of Manila, and the skill demonstrated by the same in instrumental music for almost three centuries past. Not few of them have been justly praised and rewarded in musical contests where they were presented, for example, in the Liceo Artístico [i.e., Artistic Lyceum] later the Sociedad Musical Filipina de Santa Cecilia [i.e., Filipino musical society of St. Cecilia]. [119] This institution has contributed not a little to the propagation of musical art and good taste. PUBLIC INSTRUCTION Primary instruction cannot be considered in a backward state, and, indeed, I believe that, in proportion, there are more persons who can read and write in these islands than in España, and in some [other] civilized countries. [120] In each village there is a suitable building for the use of a school, to which all the children must go except during the months of sowing and of harvest. The master, and other expenses, are paid from the communal fund. In view of this I have wondered at seeing in many foreigners the strange belief that the government does not permit the learning of reading and writing; for I can assert that, in the archives of Manila I have found many old and recently-dictated decrees, with a spirit diametrically the contrary, which repeatedly enjoin the teaching of the Castilian language. Women also share in this benefit, and I have found girls who lived not only far from the capital, but in an isolated house distant from the village, and, notwithstanding, they had learned to read and write. One must confess, however, that they scarcely know other books than those of devotion, especially a poem entitled the Pasion de Cristo [i.e., Passion of Christ]. Besides the said schools, which are equal in number to the villages and the schools of some private masters, [121] both in the chief cities of the provinces and in the capital where their number is very considerable (there being among them not a few of music and drawing), there are found in Manila various public institutions of education for men and women. In regard to them one can form a correct judgment by the following explanation. UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMÁS