72 JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [VOL. XIV. 



Cultivation of Paddy, or the lamented Mr. A. M. Ferguson's 

 on Plumbago. 



The President, Justice Stark, read a Paper on the State of 

 Crime, and Mr, Casie Chitty, long a valuable Member, gave 

 an account of some coins found at Kalpitiya. 



The remaining Paper which has come down to us from that 

 year is a second by Mr. Capper on Statistics, in which is 

 indicated yet another branch of the Society's work. He urges, 

 in days (let it be remembered) when there was no Registrar- 

 General's Department, and more than twenty years before its 

 Statistical Branch was formed, " the desirability of collecting, 

 by the agency of Members of the Society, Vital Statistics, 

 Statistics of Crime, of Education, of Traffic, and of the then 

 rising Coffee industry," and he offers some suggestions as to 

 the method of their collection. 



One other Paper, on the Temple of Dambulla, was read, but 

 apparently not printed. 



But these papers did not form the whole of the Society's 

 work. 



The beginnings were made of a Library, and two Com- 

 mittees were appointed, one — of which not much apparently 

 came — for the comparison of the Buddhism of Ceylon with 

 that of Nepal ; and the other for the establishment of 

 meteorological stations throughout Ceylon, and the collection 

 of reports from them, a work which the Society prosecuted 

 under great difficulties, but with praiseworthy persistence, 

 till its efforts were at once superseded and rewarded by the 

 establishment of the observatories connected with the 

 Surveyor-General's Department. 



Another piece of practical business carried through was the 

 association of the Society with the Royal Asiatic Society of 

 Great Britain, as its Ceylon Branch, with important privileges 

 granted to us by the parent Society. 



I have not feared that I should weary you by this summary 

 of our first year's work, because it is obviously interesting 

 to observe, both how high the quality of individual Papers 



