192 Sir Joun D’Orxy’s Sketch of the 
only of that ancient form of government which had prevailed in the interior of the 
island of Ceylon, without any material alteration, for upwards of two thousand two 
hundred years, but also of that which prevailed so far back as the very commencement 
of that distant period throughout the peninsula of India, and to afford a very valuable 
picture of one of the most ancient forms of government established in Asia. 
The late Sir John D’Oyly and I were engaged, the whole time we were together on 
Ceylon, in inquiring, amongst other objects of literary and antiquarian, curiosity, into 
the numerous remains which are still to be found in every part of the island of ancient 
Hindu history, laws, customs, manners, science, and literature.* Although I possess 
a great many different accounts of the Kandian government, laws, and institutions, 
some of them drawn up while the Portuguese and the Dutch held establishments on the 
island, and some since the English have been in possession of those establishments, 
I have none which give so accurate and so detailed a view of that government, and of 
those Jaws and institutions, as the one drawn up under the circumstances I have men- 
tioned by Sir John D’Oyly; and it was for this reason that I took the liberty, the year 
before last, of presenting it to the Society. 
Conceiving some time after that the Society might be precluded, by its length, from 
* I particularly directed my researches to such parts of the history and of the antiquities of 
the island as were connected with the state of the country between the third and the thirteenth 
centuries of the Christian era, when the immense tanks or reservoirs of water, called Kattocarre, 
Padwielcolom, Minerie, and Kandeley, in the northern districts, and the three large tanks 
in the eastern districts, together with between three and four thousand smaller tanks, were kept 
in perfect repair by the then government of the island, and formed as grand and as beneficial 
a system of irrigation as ever prevailed in any country, not excepting even Egypt, while the cele- 
brated lake Meeris was in use for regulating the inundations of the Nile. 
My view in instituting these inquiries was to obtain for his Majesty’s Ministers such informa- 
tion as might enable them to carry into effect a plan which I proposed to the late Lord London- 
derry, the then Secretary of State for the Colonies, in 1809; the object of which was, to 
encourage European capitalists, by giving them grants upon the most advantageous terms of 
such of the government lands as were in former days highly cultivated though at present com- 
pletely waste, to introduce into Ceylon European capital, European industry, and European 
arts and sciences, and thereby restore the population, the agriculture, and the commerce of the 
island to the state of prosperity which they had attained when Ceylon, according to the con- 
current testimony of historians, had a population of between four and five millions of inhabitants, 
a system of agriculture which enabled it to supply not only its own but the population of neigh- 
bouring countries with rice and many other descriptions of grain, and a system of commerce 
which made it, for many centuries, the great emporium of all the trade which was carried on 
between the western and eastern portions of the globe. 
See the different papers upon this subject given by me to the late Lord Londonderry in 
1809, and to Lord Goderich in 1831; and also my two papers in the Proceedings of the 
Royal Asiatic Society: the one on a Cufic and the other on the Trincomalee Inscriptions. 
