reduced to powder and moistened, laying the composition on the filigree and keeping it over a moderate fire until it dissolves and becomes yellow.  In this situation the piece is kept for a longer or shorter time according to the intensity of colour they wish the gold to receive.  It is then thrown into water and cleansed.  In the manufacture of baju buttons they first make the lower part flat, and, having a mould formed of a piece of buffalo’s horn, indented to several sizes, each like one half of a bullet mould, they lay their work over one of these holes, and with a horn punch they press it into the form of the button.  After this they complete the upper part.  The manner of making the little balls with which their works are sometimes ornamented is as follows.  They take a piece of charcoal, and, having cut it flat and smooth, they make in it a small hole, which they fill with gold dust, and this melted in the fire becomes a little ball.  They are very inexpert at finishing and polishing the plain parts, hinges, screws, and the like, being in this as much excelled by the European artists as these fall short of them in the fineness and minuteness of the foliage.  The Chinese also make filigree, mostly of silver, which looks elegant, but wants likewise the extraordinary delicacy of the Malayan work.  The price of the workmanship depends upon the difficulty or novelty of the pattern.  In some articles of usual demand it does not exceed one-third of the value of the gold; but, in matters of fancy, it is generally equal to it.  The manufacture is not now (1780) held in very high estimation in England, where costliness is not so much the object of luxury as variety; but, in the revolution of taste, it may probably be again sought after and admired as fashionable.

IRON MANUFACTURES.

But little skill is shown amongst the country people in forging iron.  They make nails however, though not much used by them in building, wooden pins being generally substituted; also various kinds of tools, as the prang or bill, the banchi, rembe, billiong, and papatil, which are different species of adzes, the kapak or axe, and the pungkur or hoe.  Their fire is made with charcoal; the fossil coal which the country produces being rarely, if ever, employed, except by the Europeans; and not by them of late years, on the complaint of its burning away too quickly:  yet the report made of it in 1719 was that it gave a surer heat than the coal from England.  The bed of it (described rather as a large rock above ground) lies four days’ journey up Bencoolen River, from whence quantities are washed down by the floods.  The quality of coal is rarely good near the surface.  Their bellows are thus constructed:  two bamboos, of about four inches diameter and five feet in length, stand perpendicularly near the fire, open at the upper end and stopped below.  About an inch or two from the bottom a small joint of bamboo is inserted into each, which serve as nozzles, pointing