[17] Deut. xxxiv. 6.

If, however as to Paradise in connexion with Ceylon we are forced to say “No,” if as to Taprobane in connexion with Ceylon we say both “Yes” and “No,”—­not the less we come back with a reiterated “Yes, yes, yes,” upon Ceylon as the crest and eagle’s plume of the Indies, as the priceless pearl, the ruby without a flaw, and (once again we say it) as the Pandora of oriental islands.

Yet ends so glorious imply means of corresponding power; and advantages so comprehensive cannot be sustained unless by a machinery proportionately elaborate.  Part of this machinery lies in the miraculous climate of Ceylon.  Climate?  She has all climates.  Like some rare human favourite of nature, scattered at intervals along the line of a thousand years, who has been gifted so variously as to seem

  “Not one, but all mankind’s epitome,”

Ceylon, in order that she might become capable of products without end, has been made an abstract of the whole earth, and fitted up as a panorganon for modulating through the whole diatonic scale of climates.  This is accomplished in part by her mountains.  No island has mountains so high.  It was the hideous oversight of a famous infidel in the last century, that, in supposing an Eastern prince of necessity to deny frost and ice as things impossible to his experience, he betrayed too palpably his own non-acquaintance with the grand economies of nature.  To make acquaintance with cold, and the products of cold, obviously he fancied it requisite to travel northwards; to taste of polar power, he supposed it indispensable to have advanced towards the pole.  Narrow was the knowledge in those days, when a master in Israel might have leave to err thus grossly.  Whereas, at present, few are the people, amongst those not openly making profession of illiteracy, who do not know that a sultan of the tropics—­ay, though his throne were screwed down by exquisite geometry to the very centre of the equator—­might as surely become familiar with winter by ascending three miles in altitude, as by travelling three thousand horizontally.  In that way of ascent, it is that Ceylon has her regions of winter and her Arctic districts.  She has her Alps, and she has her alpine tracts for supporting human life and useful vegetation.  Adam’s Peak, which of itself is more than seven thousand feet high, (and by repute the highest range within her shores,) has been found to rank only fifth in the mountain scale.  The highest is a thousand feet higher.  The maritime district, which runs round the island for a course of nine hundred miles, fanned by the sea-breezes, makes, with these varying elevations, a vast cycle of secondary combinations for altering the temperature and for adapting the weather.  The central region has a separate climate of its own.  And an inner belt of country, neither central nor maritime, which from the sea belt is regarded as inland, but from the centre is regarded as maritime, composes another chamber of climates:  whilst these again, each individually within its class, are modified into minor varieties by local circumstances as to wind, by local accidents of position, and by shifting stages of altitude.