[Footnote 1:  Mahawanso, ch. vii. p. 49.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., ch. xi. p. 70.]

A Singhalese narrative of the “Planting of the Bo-tree,” an English version of which will be found amongst the translations prepared for Sir Alexander Johnston, mentions the fact, that rice was still imported into Ceylon from the Coromandel coast[1] in the second century before Christ.

[Footnote 1:  UPHAM, Sacred Books of Ceylon, vol. iii. p. 231.]

Irrigation.—­It was to the Hindu kings who succeeded Wijayo, that Ceylon was indebted for the earliest knowledge of agriculture, for the construction of reservoirs, and the practice of irrigation for the cultivation of rice.[1]

[Footnote 1:  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, 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.