The smallpox (katumbuhan) sometimes visits the island and makes terrible ravages. It is regarded as a plague, and drives from the country thousands whom the infection spares. Their method of stopping its progress (for they do not attempt a cure) is by converting into a hospital or receptacle for the rest that village where lie the greatest number of sick, whither they send all who are attacked by the disorder from the country round. The most effectual methods are pursued to prevent any person's escape from this village, which is burnt to the ground as soon as the infection has spent itself or devoured all the victims thus offered to it. Inoculation was an idea long unthought of, and, as it could not be universal, it was held to be a dangerous experiment for Europeans to introduce it partially, in a country where the disorder makes its appearance at distant intervals only, unless those periods could be seized and the attempts made when and where there might be well-founded apprehension of its being communicated in the natural way. Such an opportunity presented itself in 1780, when great numbers of people (estimated at a third of the population) were swept away in the course of that and the two following years; whilst upon those under the immediate influence of the English and Dutch settlements inoculation was practised with great success. I trust that the preventive blessing of vaccination has or will be extended to a country so liable to be afflicted with this dreadful scourge. A distemper called chachar, much resembling the smallpox, and in its first stages mistaken for it, is not uncommon. It causes an alarm but does not prove mortal, and is probably what we term the chickenpox. VENEREAL DISEASE. The venereal disease, though common in the Malay bazaars, is in the inland country almost unknown. A man returning to his village with the infection is shunned by the inhabitants as an unclean and interdicted person. The Malays are supposed to cure it with the decoction of a china-root, called by them gadong, which causes a salivation. INSANITY. When a man is by sickness or otherwise deprived of his reason, or when subject to convulsion fits, they imagine him possessed by an evil spirit, and their ceremony of exorcism is performed by putting the unfortunate wretch into a hut, which they set fire to about his ears, suffering him to make his escape through the flames in the best manner he can. The fright, which would go nigh to destroy the intellects of a reasonable man, may perhaps have under contrary circumstances an opposite effect. SCIENCES. The skill of the Sumatrans in any of the sciences, is, as may be presumed, very limited. ARITHMETIC.