Material Progress of the Filipinos.—The material surroundings of the Filipino before the arrival of the Spaniards were in nearly every way quite as they are to-day. The “center of population” of each town to-day, with its great church, tribunal, stores and houses of stone and wood, is certainly in marked contrast; but the appearance of a barrio a little distance from the center is to-day probably much as it was then. Then, as now, the bulk of the people lived in humble houses of bamboo and nipa raised on piles above the dampness of the soil; then, as now, the food was largely rice and the excellent fish which abound in river and sea. There were on the water the same familiar bancas and fish corrals, and on land the rice fields and cocoanut groves. The Filipinos had then most of the present domesticated animals,—dogs, cats, goats, chickens, and pigs,—and perhaps in Luzon the domesticated buffalo, although this animal was widely introduced into the Philippines from China after the Spanish conquest. Horses came with the Spaniards and their numbers were increased by the bringing in of Chinese mares, whose importation is frequently mentioned.
The Spaniards introduced also the cultivation of tobacco, coffee, and cacao, and perhaps also the native corn of America, the maize, although Pigafetta says they found it already growing in the Bisayas.
The Filipino has been affected by these centuries of Spanish sovereignty far less on his material side than he has on his spiritual, and it is mainly in the deepening and elevating of his emotional and mental life and not in the bettering of his material condition that advance has been made.
[1] The discovery of this famous relationship is attributed to the Spanish Jesuit Abbé, Lorenzo Hervas, whose notable Catalogo de las Lenguas de las Naciones conocidas was published in 1800–05; but the similarity of Malay and Polynesian had been earlier shown by naturalists who accompanied the second voyage of the famous Englishman, Captain Cook (1772–75). The full proof, and the relation also of Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, was given in 1838 by the work of the great German philologist, Baron William von Humboldt.
[2] Relacion de las Islas Filipinas, 2d ed., p. 52.
[3] Another possible explanation of the many Sanskrit terms which are found in the Philippine languages, is that the period of contact between Filipinos and Hindus occurred not in the Philippines but in Java and Sumatra, whence the ancestors of the Filipinos came.
[4] Relacion de las Islas Filipinas, 2d ed., pp. 58, 59, chap. XVII.
[5] Arte de la Lengua Tagala.
[6] This name is derived, in the opinion of Professor Blumentritt, from Bayi, or Bay, meaning Laguna de Bay. Professor Meyer, in his Distribution of the Negritos, suggests an identification from this Chinese record, of the islands of Mindanao, Palawan (called Pa-lao-yu) and Panay, Negros, Cebu, Leyte, Samar, Bohol, and Luzon.