It is probable that in 1790, Winney and Johnston were the only white residents upon the territory now embraced within our city limits. In 1796, there were but four buildings in all that territory--as stated by the late Joseph Landon. In 1807, there were about a dozen houses. This number, it is said, had increased to more than 200 houses, when, on the 31st of December, 1813, the village was burned by the British and Indians;--only the house of Mrs. St. John, Reese's blacksmith shop, the gaol, and the uncovered frame of a barn escaping the general conflagration. The white population of the territory now comprised in our city limits did not, in 1800, probably exceed 25. The earliest census report which gives any information in regard to its population is that of 1810 when the population was 1,508. It was 1,060 in 1814; 2,095 in 1820; 5,141 in 1825; 8,668 in 1830; 21,838 in 1840; 34,606 in 1845; 49,769 in 1850; 74,214 in 1855; and 81,129 in 1860. It is believed that it is now about 100,000. But little reliable information in regard to the transportation of the mails west of Albany from 1800 to 1824, can now be obtained; and as the transportation service and the origin and progress of the system of posts, by which, even now, much of this transportation service is performed, are believed to be the most interesting of the topics of the present paper (as that service itself is the most essential of those connected with the Post-office establishment), it has been deemed proper to refer to the probable origin of that system;--a system which in its continued extension and constant improvement, has grown into the Post-office establishment of the present day. These are now, almost universally under the control of the State or sovereign power, and they are certainly among the most important and beneficent of the institutions of civil government. It is said that the Assyrian and Persian monarchs had their posts, at a day's journey from each other, with horses saddled, ready to carry with the utmost dispatch, the decrees of these despotic rulers. In the Roman Empire, couriers on swift horses carried the imperial edicts to every province. Charlemagne, it is said, established stations for carriers who delivered the letters and decrees of the court in the different and distant parts of his dominions. As early as the XIth Century the University of Paris had a body of pedestrian messengers, to carry letters and packets from its thousands of students to various parts of Europe, and to tiring money, letters and packets in return. Posts for the transmission of Government messages were established in England in the XIIIth Century, and in 1464 Louis XI. established a system of mounted posts, stationed four French miles apart, to carry the dispatches of the Government.