
KNOWLEDGE AND ART 205 
With the Mangyan and Tagbanua still maintaining 
their ancient system of writing, it seems almost certain 
that the mountaineers of Luzon—some of whom have 
been even less exposed to Spanish contacts—would have 
done the same if they had ever possessed such a system. 
The inference that they have always been illiterate 
coincides with other indications that stamp them as 
being that group of Filipinos (other than the Negrito) 
who have preserved the primitive pre-Hinduized Malay- 
sian culture in its greatest purity. 
Art. On the side of plastic and depictive art, the 
Filipino cannot be accorded the right to high rank. 
He does pleasingly decorate useful objects such as 
cloth, mats, and metal work, but he rarely goes beyond 
mere surface ornamentation, and if he does his efforts 
are almost invariably crude.. His most pretentious 
artistic achievements, such as steel and brass chasing 
and the textile patterns produced by dyeing in parts, 
have already been described, and are obviously due to 
foreign influence. The contrast between his own 
scantily and simply decorated pottery and the finely 
glazed wares which he received from China is very strik- 
ing. The cloth which he weaves according to his own 
devices usually bears only the simplest patterns, such as 
stripes. His house hasremained utilitarian, with scarcely 
even a rudimentary endeavor at ornament. The anito 
figures or idols which he once used in religion and which 
the mountaineer of Luzon still sometimes carves, were 
rude: a suggestion of the human figure in abbreviated 
conventionalized form without aesthetic aspiration suf- 
ficed all needs. Pictures as such the Filipino seems 
never to have attempted. Altogether he stands well be- 
low the Polynesian in the development of his art; and 
this is the more remarkable because industrially he was 
at least equal and economically much more advanced. 
