part of his time as a compositor in order to defray his expenses while
he continued his studies. A limited edition was published through the
financial aid extended by a Filipino associate, and sent to Hongkong,
thence to be surreptitiously introduced into the Philippines.

Noli Me Tangere ("Touch Me Not") at the time the work was written had
a peculiar fitness as a title. Not only was there an apt suggestion
of a comparison with the common flower of that name, but the term
is also applied in pathology to a malignant cancer which affects
every bone and tissue in the body, and that this latter was in the
author's mind would appear from the dedication and from the summing-up
of the Philippine situation in the final conversation between Ibarra
and Elias. But in a letter written to a friend in Paris at the time,
the author himself says that it was taken from the Gospel scene where
the risen Savior appears to the Magdalene, to whom He addresses these
words, a scene that has been the subject of several notable paintings.

In this connection it is interesting to note what he himself
thought of the work, and his frank statement of what he had tried
to accomplish, made just as he was publishing it: "Noli Me Tangere,
an expression taken from the Gospel of St. Luke,[7] means touch me
not. The book contains things of which no one up to the present time
has spoken, for they are so sensitive that they have never suffered
themselves to be touched by any one whomsoever. For my own part, I
have attempted to do what no one else has been willing to do: I have
dared to answer the calumnies that have for centuries been heaped
upon us and our country. I have written of the social condition and
the life, of our beliefs, our hopes, our longings, our complaints,
and our sorrows; I have unmasked the hypocrisy which, under the cloak
of religion, has come among us to impoverish and to brutalize us,