[4] From the report of the Orphanage at Mandaloya, in Estado (as ahead).
[5] See Appendix B, in Zúñiga’s Estadismo, ii, *105–*123, where Retana has given, with a list of the early presses in the Philippines, the names of the printers.
V.
Introduction of Printing into the Philippines.
As regards the introduction of printing itself into that archipelago, wherein (as writers agree) the first press was set to work in the opening years of the seventeenth century, yet there is dispute as to two points,—the precise date, namely, when the printing-press was first established there, and the country whence it was carried to those islands.
Though in his Biblioteca Retana inferentially states that the Spanish-Japanese Dictionary of 1630 was the earliest Philippine imprint, yet in another work of a few years ahead, one of his numerous valuable appendices to Zúñiga’s Travels,[1] the same author has maintained, rightly and soundly enough it would seem, a wholly different opinion. There he reproduces the title-page of a work printed twenty years earlier, in 1610, which he himself saw in the Museo Biblioteca de Ultramar, whereof the title (he declares) is as follows:
Arte y Reglas | de la Lengua | Tagala. | Por el Padre. F. Fray Francisco de. S. Joseph de la | Ordē de. S. Domingo Predicador General en la Prouincia | de. N. Señora del Rosario de las Islas Filipinas. |
[Here the Grand Seal of the Dominican Order (in wood) with this legend:]
| Mihi avtem ab | sit glorianisi incruce Dñi Ñri IESVXPIAD—| GAL. 6. |