Juan de Plasencia, who entered the Franciscan order in early youth, came to the Philippine Islands as one of the first missionaries of that order, in 1577. He was distinguished, in his labors among the natives, for gathering the converts into reductions (villages in which they dwelt apart from the heathen, and under the special care of the missionaries), for establishing numerous primary schools, for his linguistic abilities—being one of the first to form a grammar and vocabulary of the Tagal language—and for the ethnological researches embodied in the memoir which is presented in our text. He died at Lilio, in the province of La Laguna, in 1590. See account of his life in Santa Inés's Crónica, i, pp. 512–522; and of his writings, Id., ii, pp. 590, 591.
3 The betel-nut; see Vol. IV, p. 222.
4 The Aetas, or Negritos, were the primitive inhabitants of the Philippine Islands; but their origin is not certainly known. It is perhaps most probable that they came from Papua or New Guinea. For various opinions on this point, see Zúñiga's Estadismo (Retana's ed.), i, pp. 422–429; Delgado's Historia general, part i, lib. iii, cap. i; and Report of U.S. Philippine Commission, 1900, iii, pp. 333–335. Invasions of the islands by Indonesian tribes, of superior strength and culture, drove the Negritos into the forest and mountain regions of the islands where they dwelt; they still remain there, in a state of barbarism, but in gradually decreasing numbers. See the Report above cited (pp. 347–351), for habitat and physical characteristics of this race.
5 For much curious and interesting information regarding these superstitions, beliefs in demons, etc., see Blumentritt's ”Diccionario mitológico,” in Retana's Archivo, ii, pp. 345–454.
