the instruments most indispensable for navigation. This is enough to prove the importance which ought to be given to the naval school, whose organization must be very imperfect, since even yet its results are almost nil. It depends provisionally on the superior civil government, a circumstance which appears absurd to us. Like this there exist many things which we have neither time nor scientific capacity to unfold. It belongs to the government to do now what is proposed, namely, reform the public instruction of Filipinas. SCHOOLS OF PRIMARY LETTERS The primary school, the most interesting among all peoples, and more yet among backward peoples, was found in our time in an incipient condition, if one considers it as the government desires it, and as a great number of royal decrees resolved. Primary instruction in Castilian was alone known in Manila and some suburbs of the capital, but in the dialects of the country there existed boys' schools in all the villages, and in the majority of them, also schools for girls. It is a fact that such schools did not count on more elements than the pay assigned by the government for the teachers, [150] and the parish priests together with the provincial chiefs had to decide on the means for the construction and conservation of the edifices and furnishings, the former paying in addition their salaries to the teachers of the girls, or paying them from the funds of the churches according to the wealth of each one. This system gave the consequent result of there not being any suitable directors for complete primary instruction. But in reading, writing, and religion, in the majority of the villages of the archipelago, there was found a greater number proportionally than in España, for the missionaries always considered that education as the first element of civilization and adhesion of those inhabitants to the crown of Castilla. The government tried to improve and make general that education, but in the Spanish language. [151] For that purpose the assembly appointed in 1861 made some regulations, taking as its base the creation of a normal school, which has had realization, and according to Señor Barrantes, in the above-cited work, it seems that instruction has improved somewhat in what relates to the Spanish.