[Footnote 1:  These early errors as to the and position of Ceylon will be found explained elsewhere.  See Vol.  I. P. 1. ch. i. p. 81.]

[Footnote 2:  STRABO, xv. p. 691.  The animal referred to by the informants of Onesicritus was the dugong, whose form and attitudes gave rise to the fabled mermaid.  See AElian, lib. xvi. ch. xviii., who says it has the face of a woman and spines that resemble hair.]

[Footnote 3:  PLINY, lib. vi. ch. 24.]

MEGASTHENES, twenty years after the death of Alexander the Great, was accredited as an ambassador from Seleucus Nicator to the court of Sandracottus, or Chandra-Gupta, the King of the Prasii, from whose country Ceylon had been colonised two centuries before by the expedition under Wijayo.[1] It was, perhaps, from the latter circumstance and the communication subsequently maintained between the insular colony and the mother country, that Megasthenes, who never visited any part of India south of the Ganges, and who was, probably, the first European who ever beheld that renowned river[1], was nevertheless enabled to collect many particulars relative to the interior of Ceylon.  He described it as being divided by a river (the Mahawelli-ganga?) into two sections, one infested by wild beasts and elephants, the other producing gold and gems, and inhabited by a people whom he called Palaeogoni[2], a hellenized form of Pali-Putra, “the sons of the Pali,” the first Prasian colonists.

[Footnote 1:  See Vol.  I. P. III. ch. iii. p. 336.]

[Footnote 2:  ROBEBTSON’S Ancient India, sec. ii.]

[Footnote 3:  SCHWANBECK’S Megasthenes, Fragm. xviii.; SOLINUS POLYHISTOR, lii. 3; PLINY, lvi. ch. 24.  AELIAN, in compiling his Natura Animalium, has introduced the story told by MEGASTHENES, and quoted by STRABO, of cetaceous animals in the seas of Ceylon with heads resembling oxen and lions; and this justifies the conjecture that other portions of the same work referring to the island may have been simultaneously borrowed from the same source.  SCHWANBECK, apparently on this ground, has included among the Fragmenta incerta those passages from AELIAN, lib, xvi. ch. 17, 18, in which he says, and truly, that in Taprobane there were no cities, but from five to seven hundred villages built of wood, thatched with reeds, and occasionally covered with the shells of large tortoises.  The sea coast then as now was densely covered with palm-trees (evidently coco-nut and Palmyra), and the forests contained elephants so superior to those of India that they were shipped in large vessels and sold to the King of Calinga (Northern Circars).  The island, he says, is so large that “those in the maritime districts never hunted in the interior, and those in the interior had never seen the sea.”]