PROFESSOR BLUMENTRITT’S STUDIES OF THE PHILIPPINES
By DANIEL G. BRINTON
Now that the Philippine islands are definitely ours, for a time at least, it behooves us to give them that scientific investigation which alone can afford a true guide to their proper management. Here, as everywhere, man is the most important factor in the problem of government, and a thorough acquaintance with the diverse inhabitants of the archipelago should be sought by everyone interested in its development.
At present, I wish to direct attention to the articles on the Philippines of an author who stands easily first among scientific writers upon them, and who has devoted his life to investigations concerning them—I mean Prof. Ferdinand Blumentritt.
This is the more seasonable, as very few readers are aware of the multitude of his articles, composed as they are in several languages and issued in publications widely asunder in time and place; and yet it is indispensable for everyone desirous of learning the ethnology of the Philippines to consult many of them. I have a number of these writings in my possession, besides the titles of others, making 146 in all, published since 1880.
It would be impossible to do justice to this mass of literature in the space at my disposal. I shall therefore mention only the most valuable to the anthropologist, arranging them in the same order in which I reviewed the ethnography of the Philippines in the American Anthropologist for October, 1898.
General Works.—The most extended survey of the subject is his “Ethnography of the Philippines,” printed as a supplement to Petermann’s Mittluilungen in 1882. But this, in a measure,
