1840.] [Footnote 2: See Vol.

I.Part III.ch.iii.p.

312.] In 1843 Mr.BENNETT, a retired civil servant of the colony, who had studied some branches of its natural history, and especially its ichthyology, embodied his experiences in a volume entitled "_Ceylon and its Capabilities_," containing a mass of information, somewhat defective in arrangement.

These and a number of minor publications, chiefly descriptive of sporting tours in search of elephants and deer, with incidental notices of the sublime scenery and majestic ruins of the island, were the only modern works that treated of Ceylon; but no one of them sufficed to furnish a connected view of the colony at the present day, contrasting its former state with the condition to which it has attained under the government of Great Britain.
On arriving in Ceylon and entering on my official functions, this absence of local knowledge entailed frequent inconvenience.

In my tours throughout the interior, I found ancient monuments, apparently defying decay, of which no one could tell the date or the founder; and temples and cities in ruins, whose destroyers were equally unknown.