VESTIGES.

Byline: Jose S. Arcilla

The late Ricardo Manapat, once director of the Philippine National Archives, studied the biographies of Rizal written by both Filipino and foreign authors. He analyzed a total of 114 biographies, though not all were studies about the national hero's life and merely essays on particular aspects of his life.

The first of these was by Rizal's Austrian friend, Ferdinand Blumentritt, who in 1897 wrote with a heavy heart for a German newspaper about Rizal soon after learning of the latter's execution. In it he lamented the loss of one of the scholars he had learned to love, besides castigating in no uncertain terms the political myopia of the …