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Others can decipher the calendar and the lives of the saints, can sign their names with tolerable facility, and can make the simpler arithmetical calculations with the help of the stchety, a little calculating instrument, composed of wooden balls strung on brass wires, which resembles the "abaca" of the old Romans, and is universally used in Russia.
The province is composed of the islands of Bohol and Dauis. They are somewhat mountainous and well wooded, and coffee, abaca, sugar cane, and tobacco are raised. In the mountains of Bohol game is plenty, and many coal and phosphate of iron mines are supposed to exist. Manufactures consist in fabrics of sinamay and other materials. The area is 1,617 square miles and the population 247,745.
A number of sierras and mountains extend in various directions, forming valleys and glens fertilized by numerous rivers, which, however, have little current and volume. The length of the island is 155 miles. The chief products are abaca, rice, and cocoanuts, oil being extracted from the latter. Among the medicinal plants the most highly valued is the catbalonga seed.
This is different from the eastern part, where the latter are scarce. The principal product of the island is abaca, but rice is also raised and cocoanut oil is extracted. There are unworked mines of gold, magnetite, and sulphur. The capital is Tacloban, with a population of 5,226. It is situated 338 miles from Manila.
They lived in a bare, forlorn old house, with nothing attractive about it save the floor of the sala, which was of beautiful hard wood polished with banana leaves until it would have served for a mirror. Everything was scrupulously clean, but bespoke poverty, from the inadequate furniture of the sala to the patches and darns on the old wife's stiffly starched skirt of abaca.
The population is 95,775, distributed among 45 pueblos, 10 barrios, and 30 rancherias of subdued infieles. Abaca and palay are raised, and in the gold washings considerable gold of good quality is found.
The Government has not, however, made any real effort to cultivate it, and what has been done in that respect has been effected, up to the present date, by private enterprise. Various writers have stated that abacá is to be obtained in the north of the Celebes.
The officials were anxious to grow abaca, cacao, sugar cane and coconuts, all products of the Philippines, the soil of which resembled theirs. So they welcomed the prospect of the immigration of laborers skilled in such cultivation, the Kalambans and other persecuted people of the Luzon lake region, whom Doctor Rizal hoped to transplant there to a freer home.
Coffee also is almost wild, and large quantities of rice are exported to China. The cocoa-palm and the bamboo, as well as cacao, beans, indigo, silk, and cotton are produced. We were shown a species of banana, called abaca, the finer filaments of which, mixed with silk, are manufactured into native cloth.
There is also a species of banana the fruit of which is not good to eat, but from which raw silk is formed, called abaca, which is used to make clothes, and all kinds of cordage.
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