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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [VOL. XII. 



Hence the idea of supplementing the local supply of water, 

 by draughts from the perennial streams from the interior, 

 would naturally follow, and the accumulated wealth (whether 

 of labour or its equivalent in value is immaterial) would be 

 freely devoted to the Herculean task of bringing in sup- 

 plementary supplies of water for the purpose of consolidating 

 the national enterprise and insuring more regular harvests. 



It will form the object of a future chapter to describe 

 these great works and their functions more particularly than 

 could be conveniently clone in the present Paper. It may 

 be mentioned, however, that the water which the greatest of 

 these works could supply would not suffice for the culti- 

 vation of any such area of land as would justify their 

 prodigious cost. This fact alone suggests that their functions 

 were supplementary, and that they were not intended to 

 supply a given area with its requisite quantity, but to 

 supplement the deficiencies over a far larger area. The 

 design of the greater number of them at least, so far as it 

 has been yet discovered, seems to show that they were 

 intended to supplement deficiencies of the supply of the 

 primary working tanks that had long pre-existed, and had 

 even, when unaided by their supplemental contributions, 

 raised the country to a condition of wealth such as rendered 

 the construction of these larger works possible, and supplied 

 the means of executing them. 



The Hon. P. Ramakathan said that in the valuable Paper 

 which Mr. Wall had read the state of agriculture in Ceylon 

 at the time of Wijayo's landing had been ably considered 

 upon what might be called inferential arguments based on 

 the political situation of the country. Mr. Wall's conclusion 

 was that in the sixth century before Christ agriculture was 

 in a highly advanced condition. Sir J. Emerson Tennent 

 thought differently, on the strength of explicit statements 

 found recorded in the Mahdwansa. 



Neither Mr. Wall nor Tennent had referred to the 

 Rdmdycma, which described Ceylon as it was under the 

 Rakshasa Ki ug Ravana, at a period long anterior to the 

 landing of Wijayo. Like the Homeric poems, the Bdmdyana 



