92 SPOLIA ZEYLANICA. 
two sets of implements: a common set to meet demands of 
immediate necessity, and another for more permanent use. 
The tools of the first were crude and made by any man, while 
those of the second were the work of few, who constructed 
them, no doubt, with not a little pride. They are the index 
of the culture-stage of the folk who made them, and, in some 
measure, a criterion of the mental status of the race. 
The rise of industrial arts would naturally lead to the 
centralization of industries, with results akin to those which 
still obtain in some parts of Africa, where an entire village is 
devoted to the manufacture of spears and knives, another to 
wood-carving, &c. Nor is it perhaps too much to suppose 
that among a savage people skilled workers would be looked 
upon as a Class apart at first escaping, and later on despising, 
common labour; living by means of their craft alone and 
bartering their artefacts for the products of the chase. 
If these, then, were the conditions of pigmy times, the larger 
implements adapted to the ordinary needs of life might well 
be missing from the patana sites. There on the open ground 
a colony of pigmy-makers, protected from intrusion, no 
doubt, by a palisade of stakes, could live at ease, quite un- 
molested by the big carnivores and other dangerous inhabitants 
of the wild. The meaner people would construct the palisade 
and build the huts with timbers hewn in the neighbouring 
forest. They would supply the pigmy-makers with meat and 
fruit and honey collected in the woods. All materials for the 
manufacture of the pigmy tools were brought up from the 
valleys, and as the industry was presumably special and more 
or less exclusive, the common tools were made, no doubt, in 
the valleys below, where the streams supplied large quantities 
of quartz. 
I suggest this explanation of pigmy-factories merely as a 
working hypothesis. Further research will show whether it 
is acceptable or not, for the proof of its validity (or otherwise) 
lies in the jungles, the rice fields, and the wooded dells, which 
separate the patanas ; and these have never yet been searched. 
There is one fact which, taken together with the general 
absence of common tools and weapons of offence, seems at 
first to militate against the hypothesis I offer. Mr. Hartley 
