em down to work again. Their marriage
relations are peculiar. While the father of the family has but one true
wife, a number of women are dependent on him, widows or relatives who
have attached themselves to him. The children receive their names from
rivers, animals, or trees. If they were taken out of their environment
when very young they might be educated, as experiments have shown that
the Negrito children have the same impulses of generosity, the same
attachment to their friends, the same joys, sorrows, and sensations,
that belong to children everywhere. Only their little souls are lost
forever in the wilderness.

Neither the pagan tribes nor the Negritos read or write. The Moros,
too, are very ignorant, only the priests and students being able
to read passages from the Koran and make the Arabic characters. The
latest Malay immigrants, who had been influenced by Indian culture,
introduced a style of writing that is very queer. Three vowels
were used,--a, e, and u. The consonants were represented by as many
signs that look a good deal like our shorthand. Although there were
three characters to represent the vowels when used alone, whenever a
consonant would be pronounced with "a," only the sign of the consonant
was used. In order to express a final consonant, or one without the
vowel, a tiny cross was made below the character. If "e" was wanted,
a dot would be placed over the letter that expressed the consonant,
or if the vowel was to be "u," the dot was placed below.

Some rainy day, when you have nothing else to do, you can invent
some characters to represent our consonants, and with the aid
of dots and crosses, write a letter to yourself, and see how you
would get along if you were forced to use that kind of alphabet at
school. The natives use the Spanish alphabet to-day, which is much
like our own. Their language, being full of particles, sounds very
funny when they talk. All you would understand would be perhaps, pag,
naga, naca, mag, tag, paga; and all this would probably convey but
little meaning to you. It is a curious fact that while the dialects of
all the tribes are different, many of the ordinary words are common,
being slightly changed in the transition. The language is of a Malayan
origin, but has a number of Sanskrit words as well as Arabic. From
studying these dialects, comparing the construction of the sentence
as expressed by different tribes, and by comparing the inflections
of homogeneous verbs