NOTES. 189 
that it would be certainly most desirable to discover the stone 
implements in the caves or elsewhere, for dissipating the last doubts 
about the autochthony of the Veddas. 
Now, as former efforts, undertaken as well by British residents as 
by ourselves, failed to realize the desired result, inasmuch as we 
could not find any notice about such a discovery in the whole 
anthropological literature, we resolved to undertake a new expe- 
dition into the Vedda country—on the whole the fourth of our 
Vedda expeditions—with the special purpose named. 
This time we have been lucky enough to find a cave, near the 
village Nilgala, till a short time ago still inhabited by Veddas, the 
soil of which we found contained in great abundance stone imple- 
ments of a very rough kind. 
Further investigations of some other caves, one near Kataragam, 
the other near Kalodai, led to an identical result. Also, we succeed- 
ed in discovering upon the hilltops of the country of Upper Uva’ 
the same rough stone implements in great quantities and still well 
preserved. So that not only the autochthony of the Veddas can be 
regarded as a proved fact, but also their former distribution over 
probably the whole Island, the low-country as well as the mountain- 
ous districts of it. 
Let us here say something about this stone industry. As already 
remarked, these stone chips are of a very rough kind, belonging to the 
older or Paleolithic Stone Age, following the distinction established 
by Sir John Lubbock, now Lord Avebury. The shape of the chips, 
knives, points (lance points), scrapers, and fragments of bone awls 
enable this stone industry to be determined as belonging to the third 
period of the Paleolithic Age, the Magdalenien of G. de Mortillet. 
Yet this industry is to be denoted as a special Facies ‘Veddaica, 
inasmuch as the white quartz, for a great deal of an ice-like trans- 
parency, furnished the principal part of the material. 
Besides this, we also found a red, yellow, and black variety of 
quartz (jasper) employed in great profusion, which so coloured 
chips made a strange appearance within those caves formed by the 
megnotonous gray gneiss rock of the Island. On the whole, these 
stone implements are of a small size to be used by small hands, and 
therefore by a small-sized type of mankind. In the same manner 
the nice stone hammers, which served to strike off the chips from 
the so-called nuclei or mother stones and of which we got as many 
as forty, are of a remarkably small size. 
In opposition to the opinion often times repeated (chiefly by 
linguists and by some anthropologists, who did not think it worth 
while to study the question to the bottom), that the Veddas would 
represent nothing else than some hordes of degraded Sinhalese, we 
repeat that we must now maintain that the autochthony of the 
Veddas in Ceylon is a proved fact ; and further that the Sinhalese, 
when they first came into the Island, already had iron, which they 
2¢ 8(1)07 
