They present a most painful and humiliating spectacle to every beholder, whose feelings are not wholly callous to so sad a scene. The tenantable houses which remain, are occupied by a squalid and sickly race of Chinese, Malays and Bugis, who are generally very poor, and live upon the scantiest substance, being _unable_ to remove to a better country, away from the pestiferous air which destroys their health, occasioned by deleterious swamps, stagnant pools, and the miasma which is constantly generating from the decomposition of vegetable matter. It may be thought that I have given an exaggerated statement of the frightful mortality which _has_ prevailed, and frequently _does_ prevail at Batavia--which clothes the ground with graves, and encumbers it with monuments; but the returns of the Dutch records, according to Raynal, give the deaths of _eighty-seven_ thousand sailors and soldiers, in the hospitals, from 1714 to 1776; and upward of one million of inhabitants, in the very short space of twenty-two years, from 1730 to 1752, which can no longer leave any doubts as to its perfect correctness. Since the walls of the city were demolished by the British, and a great number of filthy and useless canals have been filled up, the general opinion is, (and more particularly within the last half dozen years,) that the old town is rather less sickly than formerly; however, no new houses are being erected within the city proper, but are extending altogether beyond the old barrier, in a southerly and easterly direction towards the country, from two to five miles, where it has been found much more healthy.