The St. Johns herald., 1896-01-11
IN THE PHILIPPINES.
Some Queer Phases of Life In the
 Archipelago.
ghs Ezsy-Going Natives and Their Large Eanflies-A Fine Quality of siIk
 xs the Principal Article of Clothing.

The seekers of strange modes of life and the student of the habits of people who have had little contact with civili- zation and have primitive homes can be satisfied by visit to almost any of the other larger islands than Luzon in the Philippine archipelago, as, for instance, Eegros, Palawan, .Mindanao and Sa- mas. In any of these isl ands, says Manila letter in the New York Times, there can be found tens of thousands of natives who, like generations of their ancestors, have never left their little island homes, and have not the faintest idea that there is any world beyond their islands. Here the race is mixed and the residents are almost of as light complexions as the residents of Manila. The young men and women are comedy, and a great many of the women between the ages of sixteen and twenty are of striking beauty. On many islands there live the Bocals, who are supposed to be the aborigines of the archipelago, and to be of Malay origin. They are an interesting race for any anthropologist to study. Travellers who have trotted about the globe say that the Bocalsi in the Philippine islands and the Panays in Borneo are about the laziest people that live. They do ab- solutely nothing that is unnecessary for living and dreaming. They have immense families-often twenty chil- dren in house, and there are multi tude of cases of parents having fifteen and eighteen boys and girls. Every family has its own house, but five dol lars will build large. and superior bamboo hut, and one dollar will make q better domicile than thousands of the Bocals own. The whole family, no mat ter how numerous, is crowded into one room at night, the sleepers reclining on heaps of dried banana leaves. Strange to say, the women are cleanly people. They bathe every day and are expert swimmers. They are proud of their teeth, and take pains to frequently polish them with rude brushes made of the areca tree. Thepoorer people have no other cooking utensils than an earthen pot, and the aristocrats have few cast-iron pans and big rough, earthen dishes.
 The substitute for cotton and wool en goods is called mouffla cloth, and it is made from the mouffla plant, which is species of hemp. The fiber of this plant is coarse, stiff and not at all pliable. It is the white, inner sur face of the long, thin shoots that is used. The natives pull the fiber out, s-k which, as consequence, is uneven and full of little punches. Very little mouff1a cloth is exported from the island, as it has an extensive domestic use. It takes an industrious woman several weeks to make a strip of mouffis cloth ten feet long and three feet wide. Flax being almost unknown on the island, the only other material for cloth is silk. The Philippine for ests are full of mulbcrrics. and silk was woven long before white men came to the islands. Some of the Philippine silk is as fine as the finest China silk. Much of it is elaborately brocaded. al- though the process requires an immense amount of time, as the threads which form the pattern have to be tied up each time separately. The nambilla, Q square piece of brocaded silk, forms the principal garment of the richer na- lives on the smaller islands. This is six feet wide by seven feet long, and re- quires about seventeen months for it's manufacture. A Philippine weaver takes her child on her back and wcaves for half an hour, then she goes down to the stream and draws jug of water, or down to the seashore for a swim in the surf. After weaving few min utes more, she again goes to the brook or to the shore, and washes out some single article of clothing, never wash ing out more than one garment at a time, so during the day she probably puts in about six hours at the loom.