Since surgery, in spite of being an almost useless science in Filipinas, where the great agricultural and industrial works which cause mutilations and accidents do not exist, for the Indian when he works never does it with the enthusiasm and abnegation which we see in Europa, but very tranquilly and carefully looking out beforehand to what he exposes himself--surgery, we repeat, properly so called--does not exist where there are no Spanish operators. For the bite of a monkey, which would disappear in a fortnight by cauterization, we have seen so many plasters applied and so many waters from miraculous springs (among them a bandage soaked in holy water) that they have very likely killed the sick person, since he had suffered two long years when we left the province. If the oils and balsams from those oleaginous plants (and among them there are some truly wonderful) produced no effect, the mediquillo, losing his bearings, soon has recourse to the charms and devilments which bring a sick one to the grave. There is another educational institution in Manila which is susceptible of great development and of producing vast advantages for the country, namely, the naval school. Poorly organized and almost always worse directed, it only graduates pupils with great pretentious, who aspire from the first moment to posts in the warships, where they are quickly confounded with the very least predicaments. If this institution on the other hand were well organized as a school of pilots, it could supply useful men to the great number of boats engaged in the coasting trade. The native sailor is bold even to folly in the ordinary accidents of navigation, but timorous and irresolute in exigencies, and absolutely lacks means to escape from them. Hence they go with the greatest impassiveness through those labyrinths of hidden rocks and reefs, which fill the sea of Mindoro and the Calamianes in pancos and paraos which scarcely can be used for the navigation of rivers and creeks. But at the first puff of a strong wind, which, although it does not break it, tears the helm from their hands at the first movement of that stormy sea where cataclysms are more frequent than ashore, the poor arraez [i.e., master] as the captain there is still called, harassed and disturbed, either kneels down with all his crew to invoke God, placing on the helm his antin-antin (amulet, a kind of scapulary which no Indian is without during these voyages, and which has more of paganism than Christianity), or takes refuge in the hatchway in order not to behold the dangers that he is running. If any Spaniard is in the boat, the command is assuredly given to him, although he understands less of sea-affairs than the said captain. That has happened more than once to all of us who have traveled much from one island to another, and surely not even in boats of a certain importance, almost brigantines, when the master is a Tagálog, have we ever met with sea-compass, barometer, or glass, or any other of