on 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, _cheiropoietoz kai
orukte_ (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 _