I. THE VILLAGE ECONOMY. THE more primitive and less changed form of the Singhalese agricultural community is to be found in the interior of the Island of Ceylon, which, as is well known, in shape and position resembles a pear, pendent, with a slightly curved stalk to the southern end of the Indian peninsula on its eastern side. A mass of mountains rising in some instances to the elevation of 7,000 or 8,000 feet, bordered at its base with a margin of lower land which continues to the coast on all sides, occupies the circular portion of the pear, and the elongated extension of this margin towards the north amounts to a moiety of the entire island. The new North Central Province which was constituted on the 6th September, 1873, for adminis trative purposes, mainly at the expense of the former Northern Province, but with some contributions from the North-Western, Central, and Eastern Provinces, covers the mid-island portion of the northern plain, abutting upon, and spreading outwards to the north from the great umbilical knot of the southern mountainous district. The whole of this new Province may be said to be one vast forest. In looking down upon it from the top of such rocky eminences as Dambulla or Mehintale, which here and there arise abruptly out of it, or even from the dome of an Anuradhapura dagoba, the eye sees only interminable jungle in a state of nature, dotted very sparsely with tiny specks of yellow-green cultivation. Some few pools of water, or tanks, may also sometimes be detected glittering in the dense and dark mass of extended forest. The hidden surface of the country is, however, not absolutely flat. In places it exhibits considerable undulation. In others it is broken by low ridges or rounded bosses of gneiss. As a rule, the pools seem to be by origin merely accumulations of water in such natural depressions of the ground as have no outlet sufficiently low to drain them, a state of things which seems to be favoured by the forest condition of the country. But their depth and size have been, in most instances, artificially increased by the expedient of an earthen bund or embankment, thrown across the lower side of the depression. In the drier seasons of the year, as the water bulk shrinks back towards the bund,— i.e. towards the deeper side,-it withdraws from the greater portion of the tank space, so that the jungle is enabled to flourish there (as it also does over the embankment itself) just as vigorously as every other where in the surrounding tracts. The result is, that it is no easy task to obtain a view of a tank even when you are in close proximity to it. And when a tank is satisfactorily full, much of it closely resembles a circuit of flooded forest. Anuradhapura, the classic city of the Mahawansa, for seven or eight centuries the metropolis of the dynas |