three successive European
nations, was at last rendered accessible by the grandest mountain road
in India; and in the north of the island, the ruins of ancient cities,
and the stupendous monuments of an early civilisation, were discovered
in the solitudes of the great central forests. English merchants
embarked in the renowned trade in cinnamon, which we had wrested from
the Dutch; and British capitalists introduced the cultivation of coffee
into the previously inaccessible highlands. Changes of equal magnitude
contributed to alter the social position of the natives; domestic
slavery was extinguished; compulsory labour, previously exacted from the
free races, was abolished; and new laws under a charter of justice
superseded the arbitrary rule of the native chiefs. In the course of
less than half a century, the aspect of the country became changed, the
condition of the people was submitted to new influences; and the time
arrived to note the effects of this civil revolution.

[Footnote 1: VALENTYN, In his great work on the Dutch possessions in
India, _Oud_ _en Nieuw Oost-Indien_, alludes more than once with regret
to the ignorance in which his countrymen were kept as to the interior of
Ceylon, concerning which their only information was obtained through
fugitives and spies. (Vol. v. ch. ii. p. 35; ch. xv. p. 205.)]

But on searching for books such as I expected to find, recording the
phenomena consequent on these domestic and political events, I was
disappointed to discover that they were few in number and generally
meagre in information. Major FORBES, who in 1826 and for some years
afterwards held a civil appointment in the Kandyan country, published an
interesting account of his observations[1]; and his work derives value
from the attention which the author had paid to the ancient records of
the island, whose contents were then undergoing investigation by the
erudite and indefatigable TURNOUR.[2]

[Footnote 1: _Eleven Years in Ceylon_, &c., by Major FORBES. 2 vols.
8vo. London. 1840.]

[Footnote 2: See Vol. I. Part III. ch. iii. p. 312.]

In 1843 Mr. BENNETT, a retired civil servant of the colony, who had
studied some branches of its natural history, and especially its
ichthyology, embodied his experiences in a volume entitled "_Ceylon and
its Capabilities_," containing a mass of information, somewhat defective
in arrangement. These and a number of minor publications, chiefly
descriptive of sporting tours in searc