STONE AGES OF CEYLON. 121 
the British, with their goods, their gods, and their women to 
settle in the land. 
History, as we know it, affords but a poor picture of man’s 
activity. Aggressively foreshortened at best, it is all conse- 
quence and no foundation. Like the Struldbrugs of Swift’s 
incomparable satire, the races of man have outlived the reach 
of memory. 
Judged by the span of mortal generations humanity is old, 
ridiculously old, yet, we suppose, it has all before it. But the 
story of man is the last paragraph, as it were, in a whole 
library of chronicles ; and well may we believe with the more 
moderate savants of the Western School that a hundred 
thousand years have gone since the Paleolithic savage BN 
shaped his implements in Britain. 
And if it were true of Britain, why not of Ceylon? The 
evidence of both is comparable in kind and in degree. The 
cradle of humanity is still unknown, in spite of many bold and 
ingenious contentions ; but as facts accumulate, it becomes 
increasingly apparent that in those dim and far-off days 
stone-age people had multiplied and spread to many corners 
of the earth. 
I submit then that we have reason to suppose that the 
plateau beds of Ceylon are comparable in age with the Pale- 
olithic deposits of Europe, and that their formation may in 
part be explained by the meteorological conditions which 
accompanied the Ice Age. 
As to the red earth which overlies the gravels, it is largely 
sand blown over the low-country from the seaboard, when 
the wet phase of the Pleistocene was passing or had passed. 
In red earth days much of the low-country no doubt resembled 
that sandy waste which borders the eastern coast of the Jafina 
peninsula at the present time ; dry and arid conditions must 
have supervened. From Cape Comorin in the Native State 
of Travancore one sees the fag-end of the Western Ghauts 
protruding from a sand plain. Not far otherwise, if one 
allows for modern cultivation, must Ceylon have appeared 
to red earth man. 
The period of denudation which followed the upheaval of 
the plateau beds gave rise to fresh deposits derived in no 
