Note 1 — Preface.
Reading edition
The following pages, embodying a survey (on a broad scale) of the chief characteristics of Philippine intellectual energy, in its various lines of art, science, letters, seem an objective worthy of the American scholar, who, to his own large group of aboriginal tongues at home, has now to add to his field of study a similarly far-reaching family of the many-toned dialects of Malaysia,—twenty-seven idioms at least in number,—according to Retana’s tabulation, whereof I give a list drawn from his latest bibliography of the Philippines,1 where, enumerating the various works published in the several dialects in use in that archipelago, he has summarized them in the following table: