I have elsewhere recorded my obligations to Mr. WYLIE, and to his colleague, Mr. LOCKHART of Shanghae, for the materials of one of the most curious chapters of my work, that which treats of the knowledge of Ceylon possessed by the Chinese in the Middle Ages.  This is a field which, so far as I know, is untouched by any previous writer on Ceylon.  In the course of my inquires, finding that Ceylon had been, from the remotest times, the point at which the merchant fleets from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf met those from China and the Oriental Archipelago; thus effecting an exchange of merchandise from East and West; and discovering that the Arabian and Persian voyagers, on their return, had brought home copious accounts of the island, it occurred to me that the Chinese travellers during the same period had in all probability been equally observant and communicative, and that the results of their experience might be found in Chinese works of the Middle Ages.  Acting on this conjecture, I addressed myself to a Chinese gentleman, WANG TAO CHUNG, who was then in England; and he, on his return to Shanghae, made known my wishes to Mr. WYLIE.  My anticipations were more than realised by Mr. WYLIE’S researches.  I received in due course, extracts from upwards of twenty works by Chinese writers, between the fifth and fifteenth centuries, and the curious and interesting facts contained in them are embodied in the chapter devoted to that particular subject.  In addition to these, the courtesy of M. STANISLAS JULIEN, the eminent French Sinologue, has laid me under a similar obligation for access to unpublished passages relative to Ceylon, in his translation of the great work of HIOUEN THSANG; in his translation of the great work of HIOUEN THSANG; descriptive of the Buddhist country of India in the seventh century.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Memoires sur les Contrees Occidentales, traduites du Sanscrit en Chinois, en l’an 648, par M. STANISLAS JULIEN.]

It is with pain that I advert to that portion of the section which treats of the British rule in Ceylon; in the course of which the discovery of the private correspondence of the first Governor, Mr. North, deposited along with the Wellesley Manuscripts, in the British Museum[1], has thrown an unexpected light over the fearful events of 1803, and the massacre of the English troops then in garrison at Kandy.  Hitherto the honour of the British Government has been unimpeached in these dark transactions; and the slaughter of the troops has been uniformly denounced as an evidence of the treacherous and “tiger-like” spirit of the Kandyan people.[2] But it is not possible now to read the narrative of these events, as the motives and secret arrangements of the Governor with the treacherous Minister of the king are disclosed in the private letters of Mr. North to the Governor-general of India, without feeling that the sudden destruction of Major Davie’s party, however revolting the remorseless butchery by which it was achieved, may have been but