The land in the vicinity, for many miles, is low and marshy, but neatly cultivated with rice. It is surprising that health should be enjoyed at all in the midst of rice-swamps, in this sultry climate: thousands of huts are built in the midst of them, when it would prove fatal to the whole population in almost any other country. The healthiness of the climate, I think, must be attributed to the narrowness of that part of the island, and to the constant and refreshing breezes which dissipate its miasma. The bamboo is one of the most useful among the vegetable creation--houses, chairs, fences, settees, buckets, boxes, baskets, hats, drinking-cups, fans, mats for boats, spear-handles, sails, &c., are made of its wood; while the tender root is served up at the table, boiled and roasted, used as a pickle and as a sweetmeat. I visited the celebrated great cigar-factory at Binondo; about five thousand females are employed in it, and about six hundred men: it is a royal monopoly. Every person is searched twice a day to see if he pilfers any of his majesty’s tobacco--he being the sole owner and master of the factory. [Sidenote: MANILA--EXPORTS.] The principal articles exported, (except gold and silver,) were indigo, sugar, rice, hemp or abacia, cotton, cocoa-nut oil, sulphur, balaté, or bichos do mar, coffee, wax and hides, in the following proportions:-- Indigo, thirty-one thousand, one hundred and nineteen arrobas, of which twenty-five thousand were agua rose or liquid, in jars; sugar, six hundred and seventeen thousand, seven hundred and thirty-eight arrobas, excepting eighteen thousand arrobas of the first quality; rice, one million, seventy-four thousand, one hundred and seventy arrobas, including two hundred thousand, uncleaned; hemp, or abacia, one hundred and fifty-three thousand, four hundred and forty-seven arrobas--it is of two qualities, and is called, in the United States, Manila-grass or hemp; cotton, four thousand one hundred and ninety-five arrobas; cocoa-nut oil, six thousand, nine hundred and sixty-four arrobas; sulphur, two thousand, four hundred and eighty arrobas; balaté or bichos do mar, five thousand, four hundred and eighty-six arrobas; coffee, fourteen thousand, six hundred and twenty-five arrobas; hides, twenty-nine thousand, nine hundred and fifty-eight arrobas.