The unhealthiness of Batavia, arising from stagnant canals, bad drinking-water, and adjacent swamps, has often been erroneously considered to extend to the entire island. The whole has been condemned for the fault of a fraction. Intermittent and remittent fevers, and dysentery, are the diseases most common, but they are generally confined to small districts. "Java," says Mr. Currie, surgeon of the 78th Regiment, which was quartered in Batavia during the whole period of the British occupation, from 1811 to 1815, "need no longer be held up as the grave of Europeans, for, except in the immediate neighbourhood of salt-marshes and forests, as in the city of Batavia, and two or three other places on the north coast, it may be safely affirmed that no tropical climate is superior to it in salubrity." The author of a hastily written and desultory volume of oriental travel,[19] founded, however, on personal experience, goes much further than this, and maintains, that "with common prudence, eschewing _in toto_ the vile habit of drinking gin and water whenever one feels thirsty, living generously but carefully, avoiding the sun's rays by always using a close or hooded carriage, and taking common precautions against wet feet and damp clothing, a man may live, and enjoy life too, in Batavia, as long as he would in any other part of the world." Mr. Davidson here refers not to the city of Batavia--which he admits to be a fatal residence, especially in the rainy season--but to the suburbs where he resided some years. These, however, only come in the second class, as regards salubrity, and are much too near the swamps, forests, and slimy sea-shore, to be a desirable abode, except for those whom business, compels to live within a drive of the city. Waitz, the Dutch writer, in his _Levensregeln voor Oost Indie_, divides the European settlements in Java into three classes; the healthy, or mountain districts, where the air is dry, and the temperature moderate; the less healthy, which are warm and damp; and finally, the positively pestiferous, where, besides tremendous heat and great moisture, the atmosphere is laden with marsh miasmata. Weltevrede, Ryswyk, and the other villages, or rather, _faubourgs_, south of Batavia, belong to the second class; Batavia itself, Bantam, Cheribon, Tubang, and Banjowangie, to the third, or worst division. And Dr. Selberg informs us, that the only two upas-trees whose existence he could ascertain, grow at Cheribon and Banjowangie, which of course was likely to confirm the popular superstition concerning the baneful influence of that tree. The coincidence, which at first appears remarkable, is of easy explanation, the upas preferring a swampy soil.