Jump to content

Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/232

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
226
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

in English and at the same time prepared an essay upon the allied elements in the Tagalog and Visayan languages. The former work he intended to dedicate to Professor Kern in the name of the Malay race, the latter he wished to inscribe to the memory of Dr. Rost. It was not granted to him to complete the manuscript of either, for he was interrupted in the midst of his work to be dragged about from tribunal to tribunal until his final sentence and death by public execution.

Fortunately his work upon the transcription of Tagalog remains to us, a translation having appeared in the Bijdragen of the Indian Institute. Unfortunately this work only increased the hatred of his political opponents, for the Spaniards were bitterly opposed to any independent work on the part of the Filipinos, being convinced that everything of the kind was merely a cloak for separatist views, and whoever was suspected of separatism in the Philippines was certain of meeting an unhappy fate.

Rizal, brought up among Spaniards, was no better instructed than they themselves in modern ethnology and, indeed, it was through Professor Blumentritt's instrumentality that his attention was first directed to the defects in his education in that direction, whereupon he began with ardor to enlarge his knowledge in comparative ethnology. The works upon general ethnography by Perschel, F. Müller, Waitz, Gerland and Ratzel, the ethnographical parallels of Andrée, Wilkin's works, the culture-historical publications of Lippert and Hellwald became at once the subject of his industrious and thorough study, a study, furthermore, which not only enlarged his knowledge but afforded him the consolation of the assurance that his people are not an anthropoid race as the Spaniards asserted, for he found that the faults and virtues of the Tagals are entirely human, and, moreover, he became convinced that the virtues and vices of any people are not mere peculiarities of race but are inherited qualities, qualities which become affected by climate and history.

At the same time he continued what he called his 'course in practical ethnology,' that is to say, he studied the life of the French and German peasantry because he thought that a peasantry preserves national and race peculiarities longer than the other classes of a people, and also because he believed that he ought to compare only the peasantry of Europe with his own countrymen because the latter are nearly all peasants. With this object in view he withdrew for weeks and months 10 some quiet village where he observed closely the daily life of the country people.

He summed up the results of his scientific and 'practical' studies in the following propositions:

1. The races of mankind differ in outward appearance and in the structure of the skeleton but not in their psychical qualities. The same