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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [Vol. IX. 



If we reject his attempt to identify these with an 

 ancient tribe of "Gallas," who may have dwelt in the same 

 portions of the south as the present Galle, and admit that the 

 rocky character of the region in which the wildest part of 

 the tribe live accounts for the name, evidently given them 

 by strangers, it does not by any means follow that the 

 rock Veddas are mountaineers. For centuries the real 

 inhabitants of the mountains have been Sinhalese, the 

 people of Mdydrata. Sir E. Tennent established the rock 

 Veddas, who, according to him, had split into five clans or 

 hunting-parties in the woods of Bintenna, and whilst the 

 village Veddas, amounting at the highest estimate to not 

 more than one hundred and forty families, lived in nine 

 small communities around the Laguna district of Batticaloa, 

 the coast Veddas, four or five hundred in number, roamed 

 about in the jungles between Batticaloa and Trincomalee, 

 chiefly in the vicinity of Eraviir and along the coast as far as 

 Vendeloos Bay. Mr. Hartshorne, however, rejects this 

 division wholly ; he distinguishes only Kele-Veddo (jungle 

 Veddas) and Gan-Veddo (half -civilised village Veddas), the 

 former only as deserving the special attention of ethnolo- 

 gists. 



If we study the map of Ceylon, it becomes at once clear 

 that Bintenna, the ancient capital, which Sir E. Tennent 

 speaks of as identical with the Maagrammum of Ptolemy,* 

 lies directly upon the eastern boundary of the moun- 

 tains towards the foreland. The Mahaweli-ganga, the largest 

 river of the Island, here bursts out from the hill-country, 

 behind which the mountains of Kandy and U'va rise 

 westward ; to the east are fertile plains, swamp lands, and 



* Tennent, I. c, I., p. 536, note 2. This he rests on the old name of 

 Bintenna having- been Mahiyangana, and asserts that this could not possibly 

 mean Mahagan, as was assumed by Christ. Lassen. (Be Taprobane insula 

 veteribus cognita. Diss, pro aditu, muneris prof, ordhi, Bonnae, 1842, 

 p. 23.) 



