
THE MATERIAL SIDES OF LIFE 97 
medan sultans often contained no more than two or 
three thousand souls. To the present day Manila 
remains the only large city in the archipelago. With all 
the development of industry and trade during three 
centuries of Spanish rule, there had grown up less than 
half a dozen settlements of ten thousand inhabitants or 
over when the Americans took possession. Cebu, when 
Magellan landed and the Spaniards first established 
themselves, is said to have contained five to ten thou- 
sand persons in the capital and environs. Not many 
years after, the town had shrunk considerably. 
Among the modern non-Christian tribes there is 
considerable variety of usage as regards the size of 
villages. In Mindanao the custom is to live in small 
scattered groups. So numerous a people as the Ifugao 
follow the same practice, their houses, in spite of con- 
stant feuds, being placed with reference to the fields 
rather than assembled for defence. The Tinggian live 
more definitely in villages; and with the Bontok towns 
of a thousand people occur. However, this region of 
more concentrated villages is precisely the district in 
which the institution of the ato or ward within the town 
is developed. Inasmuch as governmental and religious 
functions inhere in the ato, the village as a whole is in 
reality little more than an accidental conglomeration of 
smaller units. | 
In the islands as a whole, irrespective of religion or 
degree of civilization, more than one-half of all the vil- 
lages contain less than four hundred inhabitants, and 
half of the total population is resident in villages con- 
taining less than eight hundred persons. The “ villages’’ 
referred to in these data are barrios, the smallest govern- 
mental unit recognized; in reality a barrio often contains 
a number of settlements each bearing a name of its own. 
The number of actual villages is therefore considerably 

