Note 1 — CHAP. II.

: A very able report on irrigation in some of the districts of Ceylon has been recently drawn up by Mr. BAILEY, of the Ceylon Civil Service; but the author has been led into an error in supposing that, "it cannot be to India that we must look for the origin of tanks and canals in Ceylon," and that the knowledge of their construction was derived through "the Arabian and Persian merchants who traded between Egypt and Ceylon." Mr. Bailey rests this conclusion on the assertion that the first Indian canal of which we have any record dates no farther back than the middle of the fourteenth century. There was nothing in common between the shallow canals for distributing the periodical inundation of the Nile over the level lands of Egypt (a country in which rice was little known), and the gigantic embankments by which hills were so connected in Ceylon as to convert the valleys between them into inland lakes; and there was no similarity to render the excavation of the one a model and precedent for the construction of the other. Probably the lake Moeris is what dwells in the mind of those who ascribe proficiency in irrigation to the ancient Egyptians; but although Herodotus asserts it to have been an excavation, cheiropoiêtoz kai oruktê (lib. ii. 149), geologic investigation has shown that Moeris is a natural lake created by the local depression of that portion of the Arsinoite nome. Neither Strabo nor Pliny, who believed it to be artificial, ascribed its origin to anything connected with irrigation, for which, in fact, its level would render it unsuitable. Nature had done so much for irrigation in Egypt, that art was forestalled; and even had it been otherwise, and had the natives of that country been adepts in the science, or capable of teaching it, the least qualified imparters of engineering knowledge would have been the Arab and Persian mariners, whose lives were spent in coasting the shores of the Indian Ocean. It is true that in Arabia itself, at a very early period, there is the tradition of the great artificial lake of Aram, in Yemen, about the time of Alexander the Great (SALE'S Koran, Introd. p.7); and evidence still more authentic shows that the practice of artificial irrigation was one of the earliest occupations of the human race. The Scriptures; in enumerating the descendants of Shem, state that "unto Eber were born two sons, and the name of one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided." (Genesis, ch. x. ver. 25.) In this passage according to CYRIL C. GRAHAM, the term Peleg has a profounder meaning, and the sentence should have been translated—"for in his days the earth was cut into canals" (Cambridge Essay,1858.)

But historical testimony exists which removes all obscurity from the inquiry as to who were the instructors of the Singhalese. The most ancient books of the Hindus show that the practice of canal-making was understood in India at as early a period as in Egypt. Canals are mentioned in the Rayamana, the story of which belongs to the dimmest antiquity; and when Baratha, the half-brother of Rama, was about to search for him in the Dekkan, his train is described as including "labourers, with carts, bridge-builders, carpenters, and diggers of canals." (Ramayana, CARY'S Trans., vol. iii. p. 228.) The Mahawanso, removes all doubt as to the person by whom the Singhalese were instructed in forming works for irrigation, by naming the Brahman engineer contemporary with the construction of the earliest tanks in the fourth century before the Christian era. (Mahawanso, ch. x.) Somewhat later, B.C. 262, the inscription on the rock at Mihintala ascribes to the Malabars the system of managing the water for the rice lands, and directs that "according to the supply of water in the lake, the same shall be distributed to the lands of the wihara in the manner formerly regulated by the Tamils." (Notes to TURNOUR'S Epitome, p. 90.) To be convinced of the Tamil origin of the tank system which subsists to the present day in Ceylon, it is only necessary to see the tanks of the Southern Dekkan. The innumerable excavated reservoirs or colams of Ceylon will be found to correspond with the culams of Mysore; and the vast erays formed by drawing a bund to intercept the water flowing between two elevated ridges, exhibit the model which has been followed at Pathavie, Kandelai, Menery, and all the huge constructions of Ceylon, But whoever may have been the original instructors of the Singhalese in the formation of tanks, there seems every reason to believe that from their own subsequent experience, and the prodigious extent to which they occupied themselves in the formation of works of this kind, they attained a facility unsurpassed by the people of any other country. It is a curious circumstance in connection with this inquiry, that in the eighth century after Christ, the King of Kashmir despatched messengers to Ceylon to bring back workmen, whom he employed in constructing an artificial lake. (Raja-Tarangini, Book iv. sl. 505.) If it were necessary to search beyond India for the origin of cultivation in Ceylon, the Singhalese, instead of borrowing a system from Egypt, might more naturally have imitated the ingenious devices of their own co-religionists in China, where the system of irrigation as pursued in the military colonies of that country has been a theme of admiration in every age of their history. (See Journal Asiatique, 1850, vol. lvi. pp. 341, 346.) And as these colonies were planted not only in the centre of the empire but on its north-west extremities towards Kaschgar and the north-east of India, where the new settlers occupied themselves in draining marshes and leading streams to water their arable lands, the probabilities are that their system may have been known and copied by the people of Hindustan.