The Sumatrans, and more particularly the Malays, are much attached, in common with many other eastern people, to the custom of smoking opium.  The poppy which produces it not growing on the island, it is annually imported from Bengal in considerable quantities, in chests containing a hundred and forty pounds each.  It is made up in cakes of five or six pounds weight, and packed with dried leaves; in which situation it will continue good and vendible for two years, but after that period grows hard and diminishes considerably in value.  It is of a darker colour, and is supposed to have less strength than the Turkey opium.  About a hundred and fifty chests are consumed annually on the west coast of Sumatra, where it is purchased, on an average, at three hundred dollars the chest, and sold again in smaller quantities at five or six.  But on occasions of extraordinary scarcity I have known it to sell for its weight in silver, and a single chest to fetch upwards of three thousand dollars.

PREPARATION.

The method of preparing it for use is as follows.  The raw opium is first boiled or seethed in a copper vessel; then strained through a cloth to free it from impurities; and then a second time boiled.  The leaf of the tambaku, shred fine, is mixed with it, in a quantity sufficient to absorb the whole; and it is afterwards made up into small pills, about the size of a pea, for smoking.  One of these being put into the small tube that projects from the side of the opium pipe, that tube is applied to a lamp, and the pill being lighted is consumed at one whiff or inflation of the lungs, attended with a whistling noise.  The smoke is never emitted by the mouth, but usually receives vent through the nostrils, and sometimes, by adepts, through the passage of the ears and eyes.  This preparation of the opium is called maddat, and is often adulterated in the process by mixing jaggri, or pine sugar, with it; as is the raw opium, by incorporating with it the fruit of the pisang or plantain.

EFFECTS OF OPIUM.

The use of opium among these people, as that of intoxicating liquors among other nations, is a species of luxury which all ranks adopt according to their ability, and which, when once become habitual, it is almost impossible to shake off.  Being however like other luxuries expensive, few only among the lower or middling class of people can compass the regular enjoyment of it, even where its use is not restrained, as it is among the pepper-planters, to the times of their festivals.  That the practice of smoking opium must be in some degree prejudicial to the health is highly probable; yet I am inclined to think that effects have been attributed to it much more pernicious to the constitution than it in reality causes.  The bugis soldiers and others in the Malay bazaars whom we see most attached to it, and who use it to excess, commonly appear emaciated; but they are in other respects abandoned and debauched.  The Limun and Batang