THE PROGRESS OF BOTANICAL AND 

 AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE IN CEYLON 



By J. C. WILLIS, Sc.D. 



Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Ceylon 



The tropics contain a vast number of species of plants of every 

 kind, many more, generally speaking, than the temperate zones, and 

 among these there are correspondingly more plants which in some 

 way or other are useful to man. But prior to the arrival of the 

 European nations in the tropics there was but little, if any, 

 intercourse between the different countries in that zone, and 

 consequently the number of useful plants in any one country was 

 but few. How small the number could be is now hardly to be 

 realised. Thus Ceylon, to take a familiar example, owes prac- 

 tically all her useful crops, even rice, the national cultivation, 

 coco-nuts, the commonest crop, and jak (Artocarpus intcgrifolia), 

 the commonest fruit, to introductions from abroad ; the only 

 indigenous cultivation of importance is that of cinnamon. It is 

 difficult now to realise upon what plants the few natives of the 

 island lived prior to the introduction of rice by Wi-jayo, the 

 Sinhalese conqueror, in the sixth century b.c. 



Not only were there but few useful plants in any one country, 

 but agriculture, excepting in the Indian countries, was but little 

 practised, and only so far as necessary for the actual subsistence 

 of the people. The principle was of the simplest — grow all you 

 want, and consume all you grow. There was but little internal 

 trade in the products of the soil, and no export trade at all. 

 With the arrival in the tropics of Europeans all this was changed. 

 At first the white men — as has quite recently happened upon the 

 West Coast of Africa — settled down at the river-mouths and 

 upon the islands, i.e. in the places where means of transport 

 were available, and began to trade. Before long the insecurity 

 of the traders, and the general inefficiency of the tropical natives, 

 ed little by little to actual conquest of the countries, and with 

 this the doom of the old style of agriculture in them was 

 pronounced. 



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