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



take the number of seven hundred people from Magadha 

 (Behar), as the annals give it, quite literally, but whatever it 

 was, the proportion must have been something like that of the 

 Danes and the Normans in England. The larger part of the 

 Island was divided into fields and gardens, and a patriarchal 

 system introduced which has lasted for thousands of years. 

 A series of facts testify that the aboriginal population was not 

 wholly excluded from this system ; even the circumstance 

 that the Veddas were reckoned among the high caste of 

 agriculturists (Goyiwanse, or Velldla) clearly indicates that an 

 established position was early insured to them in the 

 political organisation of the country. Upon such a foundation 

 the intermingling of the Magadha people with the aborigines 

 would most naturally take place, and if we look upon the 

 Sinhalese race as the result of this commingling, the experi- 

 ence of so many other countries where a similar interming- 

 ling took place would make it perfectly explicable that the 

 Magadha people made their language, the old Pali or Elu, 

 the ruling one, while in their physical conformation the 

 aboriginal element won lasting influence. 



With such a view of the matter the Veddas and Sinhalese 

 would neither be identical nor distinguished from one 

 another simply by a degree of culture. The Veddas would 

 appear rather as representatives of the aboriginal race ; the 

 Sinhalese, on the other hand, as hybrids, produced by a union 

 of immigrant Indians with Veddas, and therefore varying 

 according to the measure of the participation of either of 

 these elements. This indeed strikes me as being the 

 solution of the anthropological problem before us, so far, at 

 least, as the material at present reaches. The linguistic 

 difficulty, that also the unmixed natives adopted the Aryan 

 language of the conqueror without, as far as we can judge, 

 having been forced to do so, appears to me no longer 

 insurmountable, since from personal experience I have 

 established the fact that in the Baltic provinces of Russia 

 one part of the Finnish population after the other, through 



