120 SPOLIA ZEYLANICGA. 
as we, and in searching for materials with which to make 
certain of his tools, he was bound to come upon artefacts of a 
pre-existing time in the gravels near the cliff top. Savage 
man is an excellent observer ; doubtless he knew well enough 
that gravels are not in general deposited upon an elevation. 
Movements of the land were presumably unknown to him, 
and the rise and fall of tides was an everyday affair. A heavy 
flood, such as might occur at almost any time, would provide 
an explanation of the gravels. The extinction of a race of 
men, save a favoured few who carried on the race, might be 
read by Neolithic man by the light of the buried artefacts. 
We have yet to show it probable that the plateau beds of 
this country are as old as the Pleistocene Ice Age of Europe, 
for without this probability our theory of the origin of the 
gravels is of little weight. 
The only criteria which we have in this connection are the 
comparative results of denudation. But it may be argued 
that denudation is more rapid in the Tropics. I hardly think 
this is so, at any rate as far as Ceylon is concerned. Have we 
not in this Island inscriptions which have felt the sun and 
rains for a couple of millennia and yet are readable? Would 
they have lasted better in Europe? I doubt it. There is no 
evidence to show that denudation in Ceylon is more rapid 
than in Europe. Since the earliest Paleolithic days the 
Thames Valley has been carved, and many of the features of 
European geography produced. Here, in Ceylon, results 
comparable to these have been achieved since the red earth 
waslaiddown. Great areas of land milesin length and breadth 
and a hundred feet in depth have been gradually eaten away 
without the assistance of a great river. Witness, for example, 
the stupendous effects of subaerial erosion which have slowly 
accrued in the Southern Province since red earth times alone. 
Secular movements of a widespread nature have impressed 
their influence on the country ; stone-age cultures have 
succeeded each other and passed away; civilizations have 
risen and declined ; great cities have been built, and the 
trackless wilderness converted to a fertile plain. All this has 
passed ; the grasping jungle has regained its own, and Euro- 
pean men have come, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and latterly 
