No. 31.— 1885.] 



PLUMBAGO. 



175 



suitable for the manufacture of superior bricks and tiles, he 

 referred to the great advantage of the vicinity of anthracite 

 to burn them. He then went on to show the importance 

 of his alleged discovery in view of the mail steamers touch- 

 ing at Galle, a consideration which, shifting the scene, 

 would now, with the vastly increased resort of steam vessels 

 to Colombo, tell with ten-fold force. Tennent, in his beauti- 

 fully written and widely-read work on Ceylon, endorsed, 

 by adopting, Gygax's statement of millions of tons of iron 

 in one locality in Sabaragamuwa, with a flux in the shape 

 of anthracite ready to hand and yet in all these years 

 the inhabitants or colonists of Ceylon have neither bestirred 

 themselves, nor been by outsiders reproached for their 

 criminal apathy in neglecting such magnificent resources, 

 while the island has been several times shaken from its 

 propriety by alleged discoveries of gold in paying form 

 and quantity. In the history of scientific exploration and 

 report, and of colonial history and progress, there seems 

 to be no greater fiasco. 



The curious part of the matter is that in his first report 

 of 1847, which is extant in the Colonial Secretary's Office, 

 and the peculiar English of which is uncorrected, the Swiss 

 geologist said not one word about anthracite, so prominently 

 introduced into his later report of 1848 from which I have 

 quoted, and the style of which is as purely idiomatic and 

 graphic as that of the great writer on Ceylon who adopted 

 and gave world-wide currency to statements of mineral 

 finds which, if not apocryphal, have certainly not been 

 confirmed by later explorers of our rocks. Any suspicion, 

 however, which might be entertained of Tennent' s sincerity 

 in his avowed belief of Dr. Gygax's discovery, is removed by 

 the fact that the latter included anthracite in a collection of 

 the minerals he had personally collected during his official 

 survey, and which, as already stated, he lodged in the 

 Museum of this Society. 



True, there was one man, a British merchant, the late Mr. 



* Tennent's statement is : " The anthracite alluded to by Dr. Gygax 

 is found in the southern range of hills near Nambapana, in close prox- 

 imity to rich veins of plumbago." The rich veins of plumbago are a 

 reality, but the anthracite seems to be as mythical as Sinbad the Sailor 

 and his gems. 



