According to Benedict Anderson, the historian of nationalism, “few countries give the observer a deeper feeling of historical vertigo than the Philippines.” The history of science in the Philippines produces a similar giddy sensation – indeed, one might easily substitute apparent conundrums of scientific development for Anderson’s strange political and social juxtapositions. For example, after three hundred years of Spanish clerical colonialism, fewer than 10 percent of the local inhabitants were literate in Spanish, yet the Catholic religious orders had supported pioneering natural history and astronomical research, and from the seventeenth century had even sponsored universities in the archipelago.