A NATURALIST'S RAMBLES IN CEYLON. 
BY H. HENSOLDT.' 
I October, 1875— when I 
1 but well-known univer- 
sity town in Germany, a friend, and for awhile fellow-student, Dr. 
Ferdinand Goldschmied, was preparing for a voyage to the dis- 
tant island of Ceylon. Dr. Goldschmied was a young man of 
unusual attainments, an enthusiast, a lover of science for its own 
sake, — not one of those who look upon science as a sort of trade, 
which they follow for the sake of what it is likely to bring them 
in the shape of money or fame. He took an interest in every 
department of science, but his favorite subjects were ethnology, 
oriental languages, and the ancient civilization of the East. 
A year or two previous to this German orientalists had been 
greatly excited over the publication (by a Leipzig professor) of a 
little work on ruined cities in southern India, Ceylon, and .several of 
the i-slands of the Malay archipelago, such as Java, in which it was 
attempted to prove that long before the Aryan invasion — at a 
time so remote that neither history nor tradition has preserved 
the slightest trace of it — these countries were densely inhabited by 
a race of people possessed of a high degree of civilization, as 
evinced by the splendor of their cities, still imposing in their 
ruins, by their enterprise and skill in constructing reservoirs, tanks, 
canals, highways, etc., rivaling in this respect the most celebrated 
achievements of modern engineering, but a race which in lan- 
guage, customs, architecture, and so forth, was totally different 
from the present inhabitants of these countries. 
Dr. Gold.schmied was profoundly impressed with this work. 
Here was an entirely new field for research, a field practically un- 
trodden, and promising glorious revelations ; here perhaps lay 
buried some of the most important secrets of the pa.st (he was 
one of the believers in the vast antiquity of the human race), 
but a field accessible only to one who could personally go and 
' .School of Mines, Columbia College, New York. 
