[Illustration:  WRITING WITH A STILE.]

The furrow made by the pressure of the steel is rendered visible by the application of charcoal ground with a fragrant oil[1], to the odour of which the natives ascribe the remarkable state of preservation in which their most sacred books are found, its aromatic properties securing the leaves from destruction by white ants and other insects.[2]

[Footnote 1:  For this purpose a resin is used, called dumula by the natives, who dig it up from beneath the surface of lands from which the forest has disappeared.]

[Footnote 2:  In Ceylon there are a few Buddhist books brought from Burmah, in which the text is inscribed on plates of silver.  I have seen others on leaves of ivory, and some belonging to the Dalada Wihara, at Kandy, are engraved on gold.  The earliest grants of lands, called sannas, were written on palm-leaves, but an inscription on a rock at Dambool, which is of the date 1200 A.D., records that King Prakrama Bahu I. made it a rule that “when permanent grants of land were to be made to those who performed meritorious services, such behests should not be evanescent like lines drawn on water by being inscribed on leaves to be destroyed by rats and white ants, but engraved on plates of copper, so as to endure to posterity.”]

The wiharas and monasteries of the Buddhist priesthood are the only depositaries in Ceylon of the national literature, and in these are to be found quantities of ola books on an infinity of subjects, some of them, especially those relating to religion and ecclesiastical history, being of the remotest antiquity.

Works of the latter class are chiefly written in Pali.  Treatises on astronomy, mathematics, and physics are almost exclusively in Sanskrit, whilst those on general literature, being comparatively recent, are composed in Elu, a dialect which differs from the colloquial Singhalese rather in style than in structure, having been liberally enriched by incorporation from Sanskrit and Pali.[1] But of the works which have come down to us, ancient as well as modern, so great is the preponderance of those in Pali and Sanskrit, that the Singhalese can scarcely be said to possess a literature in their national dialect; and in the books they do possess, so utter is the dearth of invention or originality, that almost all which are not either ballads or compilations, are translations from one or other of the two learned languages.

[Footnote 1:  TURNOUR’S Introd. to the Mahawanso, p. xiii.  A critical account of the Elu will be found in an able and learned essay on the language and literature of Ceylon by Mr. J. DE ALWIS, prefixed to his English. translation of the Sidath Sangara, a grammar of Singhalese, written in the fourteenth century.  Colombo, 1852.  Introd. p. xxvii. xxxvii.]

I. PALI.—­Works in Pali are written, like those of Burmah and Siam, not in Nagari or any peculiar character, but in the vernacular alphabet.  Of these, as might naturally be expected, the vast majority are on subjects connected with Buddhism, and next to them in point of number are grammars and grammatical commentaries.