thousand square miles. The great artery of the country is the Perak
river, a most serpentine stream. Ships drawing thirteen feet of water
can ascend it as far as Durian Sabatang, fifty miles from its mouth,
and boats can navigate it for one hundred and thirty miles farther.
This river, even one hundred and fifty miles from its mouth at Kwala
Kangsa, is two hundred yards wide, and might easily be ascended by
"stern-wheel" boats drawing a foot of water, such as those which ply on
the upper Mississippi. Next in size to the Perak is the Kinta, which
falls into the Perak, besides which there are the Bernam and Batang
Padang rivers, both navigable for vessels of light draught. Along the
shores of these streams most of the Malay kampongs are built.

The interior of Perak is almost altogether covered with magnificent
forests, out of which rise isolated limestone hills, and mountain
ranges from five thousand to eight thousand feet in height. The scenery
is beautiful. The neighborhood of the mangrove swamps of the coast is
low and swampy, but as the ground rises, the earth which has been
washed down from the hills becomes fertile, and farther inland the
plains are so broken up by natural sand ridges which lighten the soil,
that it is very suitable for rice culture.

Tin is the most abundant of the mineral products of Perak, and, as in
the other States, the supply is apparently inexhaustible. So far it is
obtained in "stream works" only. The export of this metal has risen
from 144,000 pounds in 1876 to 436,000 pounds in 1881. Tin-mining
continues to attract a steady stream of Chinese immigration, and the
Resident believes that the number of Chinamen has increased from twenty
thousand in 1879 to forty thousand in 1881. Wealth is reckoned in slabs
of tin, and lately for an act of piracy a Rajah was fined so many slabs
of tin, instead of so many hogsheads of oil, as he would have been on