In a jungle-covered country like Ceylon, diseases of the most malignant character are harbored in these dense and undisturbed tracts, which year after year reap a pestilential harvest from the thinly-scattered population.

Cholera, dysentery, fever and small-pox all appear in their turn and annually sweep whole villages away.

I have frequently hailed with pleasure the distant tope of waving cocoa-nut trees after a long day's journey in a broiling sun, when I have cantered toward these shady warders of cultivation in hopes of a night's halt at a village.
But the palms have sighed in the wind over tenantless abodes, and the mouldering dead have lain beneath their shade.

Not a living soul remaining; all swept away by pestilence; huts recently fallen to decay, fruits ripening, on the trees, and no hand left to gather them; the shaddock and the lime falling to the earth to be preyed upon by the worm, like their former masters.

All dead; not one left to tell the miserable tale.
The decay of the population is still progressing, and the next fifty years will see whole districts left uninhabited unless something can be done to prevent it.