THE ISLAND OF CEYLON. 
10 $ 
herbs ; and then bury him up to the chin in hot sand. When 
the legs only are attacked, although the disorder be the same, 
its name differs : a patient is then said to have got elephant legs , 
from the resemblance their legs bear at that time to those 
of these animals. They arc also called Cochin tegs, from the 
disease being very prevalent among the natives of the place 
of that name on the Malabar coast, owing to the unwhole- 
some brackish water which is drunk there. 
The rainy season does not produce consequences so danger- 
ous to Europeans, although fluxes and bowel complaints are 
then much more frequent among them, than during the dry 
weather. Our soldiers too, by drinking plentifully of arrack 
and smoking tobacco, counteract the bad effects of the at- 
mosphere and the water ; while the natives on the other hand 
live so abstemiously, few or none of them eating flesh, or 
drinking any thing but water, that when once they are seized 
with these exhausting distempers, their constitutions want 
strength to resist them, and they usually fall victims. 
On the inside of the roads where the larger ships anchor, 
and separated from them by a sand bank which stretches 
quite across it, lies a bay sufficiently commodious for the re- 
ception of small ships and domes , the country name for small 
sloops and decked boats. This bay forms a half moon on one 
side of the fort ; which, by its projection into the sea, breaks 
the violence of the storms, and affords shelter from the south- 
west winds to the vessels moored here. The water on the bar 
is too shallow to allow ships of a large burden to pass; and 
