MALACCA, a town on the sea-coast of the Malay Peninsula, which gives its name to a district, forming part of the Straits Settlements under the British Colonial Office. The light house is in lat. 2° 11' N., and long. 102° 16' E. The mean length of the province is 40 miles, the average breadth being 25, comprising an area of 1000 square miles, with a population of 77,756. 'Malacca derives its name, according to Malay history, from the Malaka tree, Jambosa Maine censis. The country a few miles inland is formed of undulating hills, moderately elevated, called Malacca Hills, and 71 leagues E. by N. •i N. From it rises the high mountain Gunong Ledang, called also Queen Mount, also Mount Ophir, about 7000 feet high. Except Goa, Malacca was the earliest European settlement in the east, and was at one time the great emporium of trade from the innumerable islands of the Eastern Archipelago, but has seen many changes since it was wrested from Muhammad Shah by the Portuguese in 1511; and in 1547 the salvation of this city from the Achinese was ascribed to the sudden appearance of Saint Francis Xavier, the apostle of India, who was then on his pilgrimage through the east. After remaining in quiet possession of Portugal for 130 years, it fell into the hands of the Dutch, who held it for 74 years, when the British took possession, and their first act was to demolish the fort, erected at a vast cost hy the Portuguese, and much improved by the Dutch. In J818, Malacca was again ceded to the Dutch, who finally exchanged it with the British for •Boncoolen and other settlements in Sumatra. In 1825, the British, by treaty with the Dutch, agreed to hold no possessions in the Archipelago south of the equator, and the Dutch, vice versa, north of the equator.
The great mineral product is tin. In the great tin mining district thousands of Chinese work,— some by surface washings, others by following up veins deep into tho bowels of the earth, and others by grinding the quartz so richly impregnated with the stanniferous ore that is almost metallic in its matrix. Water power, somewhat in principle of the Egyptian wheel, is the usual means resorted to to raise the accumulating water from the pits, the chain of buckets running down an inclined plain often exceeding a hundred feet. The ore is smelted in small furnaces, a rapid white heat produced by the action of a double bellows made from the trunk of a tree hollowed out, and the ore, as in iron, runs out at an aperture below the furnace into moulds prepared for it. The tin is sold on the spot for 25 dollars a pikul ; the price in England is double that. Near Malacca are ther mal springs, 137° being the average heat through out the year. There are six of these springs in a square of about 100 feet, perpetually steaming and boiling over. A powerful odour of sulphurathd hydrogen is evolved ; the water is clear, strongly impregnated with iron and sulphur, and held in great repute both as a vapour and plunge bath, chiefly in cutaneous maladies.
At the census of 1881 the population was found to be—Malays, 57,474 ; Chinese, 13,450 ; 2874 ; Arabs, 303 ; Boyanese, 135 ; Bugis, 85 ; Javanese, 339 ; Siamese, 6. The district pro duces many valuable timber trees.—Census.