( 54 ) 
Wijaya and his followers," summarises Mr. 
Ranesinyhe, "could not have been Fali, as that 
ianxuaue is now known to us, but it must have 
been Prakrit or corrupt Pali, which, Protest^or 
Max Miilier says, was the parent of all the Aryan 
vernaculars of India, and this su|iposilion is con- 
firmed by the fact tliat the early rock inscriptions 
in Ceylon are in a corrupt Prakiit."— p 3. Another 
misapprehension which the book will remove is 
in regard to the term Elu, whose derivation has 
baffled some older scholars who considered it 
to he a special poetical dialect of the Sinhalese. 
In the first page of his book Mr. Ranesinghe 
shows the word Biu to be no other than a 
different form or derivative of the term Sinhala. 
Prolessor R C Childers first pointed this out 
some years ago in a paper contributed to the 
Royal' Asiatic Society of Great Britain and 
Ireland, and Mr. Ranesinghe has further traced 
the derivation of the term. Asregaids the form 
of the Sinhalese letters the author says that 
" an examination of the. l.at characters, in which 
the ancient rock inscriptions of Ceylon are 
inscribed, with their development Irom lime to 
time, will clearly shew ihi.t the modern Sinhalese 
letters are evolved from them, and those letters 
that are not found in the inscriptions and peculiar 
to Sanskrit are taken from the Dewa Nagara." 
The book is an excellent production of the 
kind and by its publication Mr Ranesnighe has 
rendered a t;reat service to I'lnlological Science. 
The work w'hjn complete— for it is only the first 
part that is out— shor hl go a great wny to sui)ply 
•what is so much needed: a Historical Grammar of 
the Sinhalese Language, a volume to occupy the 
place so admirably filled in England by Dr Morris's 
Grammar. It may be added that the bonk is very 
neatly and carefully got-up by the Government 
Printer, and I have succeeded in detecting only 
one typographical error, e gf., the title of ch : II. 
for eh : III. at the head ot the latter chapter which 
lias not been noted in the "ei rata" column.— iJBRA. 
THE GEOLOGY OF CEYLON. 
We omitted yesterday to call attention to 
the able review by Mr. A. K. Coomara- 
swamy— now in the island— of a learned paper 
by a German scientist wn the geology of Cey'on, 
or rather on the department affectmg our 
plumbago deposits and granulitic rocks. 
Professor Weinschenk arrives at conclusions 
as to the geological sequence of events in 
Ceylon, which are nc .doubt satisfactory to 
his fellow-scientists but which we confess 
are rather puzzling to our ordinary non- 
scientific lay mind. Mr. Coomaraswamy 
would be doing a service if he interpreted the 
learned German's conclusions into language 
that might be "understaiuled of the common 
people", and still more, if he would show us 
how far progress has been made in explain- 
ing two of the most mysterious rocks in 
our earth's crust, which are abundant 
in reylf>n, namely, laterite or cabook and 
graphite or plumbago. Where the iron of the 
one came trotn and the carbon of the other, 
we have alwiiys understood that even the 
inost accomplished geologists would be chary 
of dogmatically affirming About low-level 
laterite i-omething may be said; but gneiss and 
•ther rocks passing into laterite on the top of 
a hill is another question. Equally difficult 
is it to say whether graphite was deposited 
from water or solidified from gas. We would 
like to know if the German Professor ex- 
plains why the mineral should have so strong 
an affinity to quartz, or is this still amongst 
the as yet unsolved problems of the science of 
Geology ? We would again press for the Geo- 
logical (Survey so kmg promised and talked of, 
to take up the work systematically for the island 
as a whole, and we trust to see Mr. Coomara- 
swamy's services retained and utilised 
by the Government when that Survey ac- 
tually begins. 
[Extracted from the (Jkological Magazine, 
Decade IV, Vol. Vllf. No. 442, p, J75, 
Apil, 1901.] 
E. Weinschenck. Zur Kenniiiiss der Grapbitla- 
gerstatien. III. Die Graphitlagersiiitten der 
Insel Ceylon. Abh. k. bay. akad. Wiss, CI. II, 
Bd. x.\i, Abth. 11 ; Miii.clien, J900. 
Piofessor Wein.'^chenck hiis examiiied a series 
of rock and vein specimens from the grajdiite 
mines of Ragedaia, Ampe, Pusliena, and Hunibu- 
hiwa, in Ceylon, collected by Dr Gninliog. Hi 
discu-ses the nature of the granulitic rocks 
^nd the mode of occurrence and origin of the 
gia|ihite. 
A general petrographical desciiption of th« 
granulitic roi ks is given, illustrated by thre« 
plates of microphotographs. Massive habit, grnnu- 
iitic structure, and variable chemical composition 
ari- characteristic. Except in the more basic 
varieties, intergrowths of two felspars aie very 
noticeable. The granulitic rocks include a con- 
tinuous series ranging from aplites (weiss sti-ine") 
to pyroxeneplagioclase rocks (trapp-granuliten) 
and even pyroxenites. A rather oily lu.stre and 
greenish colour are very characteristic features, 
The constituent minerals are in a remarkably 
fresh condition, excejit in the immediate neigh- 
bourhood of the graphite veins. It is interesi ing 
to note that Professor Weinschenck does not 
mention any pleochroic monoclinic pyroxene. 
There are certain other r. cks in Ct-ylon which 
incUide coar.se grained dolomiies and ' cipolins,' 
containing blue apatite and contact mineral such 
as forsterite, chondrodite, phlogopite and spinel, 
and also the peculiar andahiste, sillimanite, and 
corundum bearing rocks described by Lacroix. 
The granuliiic rocks show no trace of the opera- 
tion of dynamic causes ; they are regarded as an 
eruptive mass which may form a single unit or be 
compound in character. The occurrence of coar.«e 
crystalline dolomites in the midst of the granulitic 
series seems to show that difleient eruptive units 
are separated by contact rocks. The existence of 
still younger eruptive masses of granite has not yet 
been demonstrated, for the few rocks as yet de- 
scribed from Ceylon as granite are ratlier varieties 
of the granulitic series. 
Professor Weinschenck compares the Saxon and 
Ceylon granulites, thinking with Naumann that 
the former are truly eruptive rocks. Had the 
Ceylon rocks been studied before those of Saxony 
this view would have been more widely held. They 
differ from the Saxon rocks chiefly in their non- 
schistos character and coarser grain. Lehmann re- 
garded the peculiarities of the Saxon granulites as 
the result of dyn irno metamorphisni. He regarded 
the niicroperthitic intergrowths of two felspars as 
the result of such a process, but as these are 
