For successive generations, however, the natives, although treated with partial kindness, were regarded as a separate race.  Even the children of Wijayo, by his first wife Kuweni, united themselves with their maternal connexions on the repudiation of their mother by the king, “and retained the attributes of Yakkhos,"[1] and by that designation the natives continued to be distinguished down to the reign of Dutugaimunu.

[Footnote 1:  Mahawanso, ch. vii.]

[Sidenote:  B.C. 104.]

In spite of every attempt at conciliation, the process of amalgamation between the two races was reluctant and slow.  The earliest Bengal immigrants sought wives among the Tamils, on the opposite coast of India[1]; and although their descendants intermarried with the natives, the great mass of the population long held aloof from the invaders, and occasionally vented their impatience in rebellion.[2] Hence the progress of civilisation amongst them was but partial and slow, and in the narratives of the early rulers of the island there is ample evidence that the aborigines long retained their habits of shyness and timidity.

[Footnote 1:  Ibid., p. 53.]

[Footnote 2:  Mahawanso, ch, lxxxv.]

Notwithstanding the frequent resort of every nation of antiquity to its coasts, the accounts of the first voyagers are almost wholly confined to descriptions of the loveliness of the country, the singular brilliancy of its jewels, the richness of its pearls, the sagacity of its elephants, and the delicacy and abundance of its spices; but the information which they furnish regarding its inhabitants is so uniformly meagre, as to attest the absence of intercourse; and the writers of all nations, Romans, Greeks, Arabians, Chinese and Indians, concur in their allusions to the unsocial and uncivilised customs of the islanders.[1]

[Footnote 1:  See an account of these singular peculiarities, Vol.  I. P. IV. c. vii.]

As the Bengal adventurers advanced into the interior of the island, a large section of the natives withdrew into the forests and hunting grounds on the eastern and southern coasts.[1] There, subsisting by the bow[2] and the chase, they adhered, with moody tenacity, to the rude habits of their race; and in the Veddah of the present day, there is still to be recognised a remnant of the untamed aborigines of Ceylon.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Hiouen Thsang, the Chinese geographer, who visited India in the seventh century, says that at that time the Yakkhos had retired to the south-east corner of Ceylon;—­and here their descendants, the Veddahs, are found at the present day,—­Voyages, &c., liv. iv. p. 200.]

[Footnote 2:  Mahawanso, ch. xxiv. p. 145, xxxiii. p. 204.]

[Footnote 3:  DE ALWIS, Sidath Sangara, p. xvii.  For an account of the Veddahs and their present condition, see Vol.  II.  P. ix. ch. iii.]

[Sidenote:  B.C. 104.]