We found the human inhabitants of this wonderful region a highly unsatisfactory lot. The Manobo families were living either singly, scattered along the river, or grouped in little villages composed of a dozen or two rotting huts and surrounded by the accumulated filth of years. As was to be anticipated under the circumstances, most of the people were full of malaria, and many suffered from repulsive skin diseases. They had little cultivated ground. The growing and cleaning of hemp was their only resource, and they had become so accustomed to having the products of their labour taken from them by the people of Butuan that they had almost given up working. They listened with dull, uncomprehending hopelessness to our story of better days to come, and it soon became evident that nothing but practical experience would convince these helpless people that times were going to change. The Filipinos of Talacógon were an especially lazy, vicious lot, who did no work themselves, but sponged or stole a living from their non-Christian neighbours. Forest trees were springing up on the plaza of this town. Its streets were deep in mud, and its sanitary condition beggared description. I was really afraid to stay overnight. I ordered the people to clean up, and they laughed at me. I ultimately made them clean up, but they successfully resisted my efforts to do so longer than the people of any other town ever did, and several years passed before I was at all satisfied with results. Our progress up the river was unimpeded until we reached what is shown on the maps of Mindanao as a series of extensive lakes, but is in reality a huge and trackless swamp. Some years before a very severe earthquake had caused the subsidence of a vast forested area along the banks of this portion of the Agusan River, with the result that the old river-bed was completely broken up, and the river below this point reversed its flow for some time until the depressed region had been filled up by the water which entered it from all sides. There were no well-established channels through this submerged forest, and navigation in it was dangerous unless one had experienced guides.