Although Batum is not very attractive as a town, it is at any rate far preferable to Poti or Sukhum, and it has undoubtedly a splendid future before it. Even at the present time the exports amount to nearly 400,000 tons, chiefly petroleum, manganese ores, wool, cotton, maize, tobacco, wine, fancy woods, &c. It is essentially a city of the future; and its inhabitants firmly believe that it will yet be a powerful rival of Odessa in trade, and of the Crimean coast-towns as a watering-place. At present we should hardly recommend it to invalids; the marshes round about are gradually being drained; but they still produce enough malaria to make the place dangerous to Europeans; the drinking-water, too, is bad. The harbour is fairly well sheltered, but rather small; yet, to the unprofessional eye, there seems no reason why it might not easily be enlarged if necessary. The entrance is protected by a fortification in the form of an irregular rectangle, lying on the S.W. corner of the bay, behind the lighthouse. The earthworks, about seventy or eighty feet high, and lined with masonry, cover a piece of ground apparently about 300 paces long by 180 paces broad; a broad-gauge railway surrounds the fortress. When I was there the work was being pushed forward very rapidly, and preparations were being made to fix a heavy gun close to the lighthouse--at that time there were only about a dozen guns of small calibre in position. In the town there is absolutely nothing to attract the stranger's attention; a few mosques and churches, petroleum refineries, half a dozen European shops, some half-finished public buildings, and the embryo of a public garden on the shore serve as an excuse for a walk; but if the traveller happens to hit upon a spell of wet weather, he will soon have seen all he wants to see of Batum, and will get out of its atmosphere of marsh gas and petroleum as soon as possible.