besides which they have a farm for raising cattle.  The accounts of these funds are kept, for the superintendent, by him who enters in his place each year.  The royal hospital for the Indians has five hundred pesos of income, two hundred pieces of cloth from Ylocos, one thousand five hundred fanegas of rice in the hull, one thousand five hundred fowls (which your Majesty presents to them), and a farm for breeding cattle.  I am aiding both of them with various alms and grants, and, as I have informed your Majesty, I regularly assign to that of the Spaniards eight toneladas, which are worth eight hundred pesos each year; and to that of the natives four, which are of proportionate value.  I took possession of that of the natives in your Majesty’s name, according to the royal patronage, and audited the accounts, a sworn statement of which will go with this.

7. That the seminary for the training of girls is in good condition, and the building finished; but it has little income, and will have to be reduced to a convent of professed nuns, and its income somewhat increased.

The Seminary of Santa Potenciana is in very good condition; for not only has the church been finished for some years, but it has a capacious building entirely of stone, in which some thirty women are leading a religious life.  Most of these are the maiden daughters of honorable men; others are poor mestizas, and still others have been left there who have husbands or fathers absent on your Majesty’s service; there are also a few older women.  They have a superior who is a woman of quality, and who lives a very exemplary and pious life.  All of them intend either to remain there in the service of God, or to leave married, and in a bettered situation—­as several have done and are now doing (thanks to the good name which the institution has), which is the holy intention of your Majesty.  They have a director and a confessor who do not live in the building, as no apartment has been built for them.  For two months past the holy sacrament has been administered there.  These women, thus secluded, celebrate the divine offices with singing, and with as much veneration and as fittingly as if it were a convent of nuns founded forty years ago.  It has four hundred pesos of perpetual income and as much more temporarily from a shop in the Parian of the Sangleys; but this is not enough to maintain it, and so they are in great need.  I contrive to help it with alms and various grants wherewith it may be supported.  I have tried to reduce it to a convent of professed nuns and have done my best with the viceroy of Nueva Espana, to have him send me two religious women, of pious life, from Mexico to found it.  He answers me that there is no one who dares to go to these islands, on account of the difficulty of the journey and the inconvenience of the ships.  I beseech your Majesty that—­as this work is so important to this commonwealth, and in order to place in a better position here the daughters of honorable men who have not the money to marry them, on account of the depreciation of the encomiendas and property—­you may be pleased to order the viceroy to be diligent in coming to our aid by enabling these religious to come; and that you will give to this seminary an income adequate for its maintenance, or give me permission to apply to it some repartimiento of Indians.