The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes by Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow;Chas. Wilkes;Fedor Jagor;Tomás de Comyn
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photographic pictures have familiarized the scenes and objects,
and also the consequently superfluous references to these. No other omission has been allowed, for if one author leaned far to one side in certain debatable questions the other has been equally partisan for the opposite side, except a cerement on religion in general and discussion of the world-wide social evil were eliminated as having no particular Philippine bearing to excuse their appearance in a popular work. The early American quotations of course are for comparison with the numerous American comments of today, and the two magazine extracts give English accounts a century apart. Virchow's matured views have been substituted for the pioneer opinions he furnished Professor Jagor thirty years earlier, and if Rizal's patron in the scientific world fails at times in his facts his method for research is a safe guide. Finally, three points should constantly be borne in mind: (1) allowance must be made for the lessening Spanish influence, surely more foreign to this seafaring people than the present modified Anglo-Saxon education, and so more artificial, i.e., less assimilable, as well as for the removal of the unfavorable environment, before attempting to from an opinion of the present-day Filipino from his prototype pictured in those pages; (2) foreign observers are apt to emphasize what is strange to them in describing other lands than their own and to leave unnoted points of resemblance which may be much more numerous; (3) Rizal's judgment that his countrymen were more like backward Europeans than Orientals was based on scientific studies of Europe's rural districts and Philippine provincial conditions as well as of oriental country life, so that it is entitled to more weight than the commoner opinion to the contrary which though more popular has been less carefully formed. |
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