In May, 1872, I was invited by my learned friend and pandit Kewiṭiyágala Unnánsé, of the Malwatté Monastery in Kandy, to be present at an ordination service, held, according to custom, on the full-moon day of Wesak, (May, June), being the anniversary of the day on which Gautama Buddha attained Nirváṇa, B.C. 543. I gladly availed myself of this opportunity of witnessing the celebration of a rite of which Englishmen have but little knowledge, and which has rarely, if ever, been witnessed by any European in Ceylon.

The Coimbatore District, containing more than 8000 square miles, is almost centrally situated in the south of the Peninsula, within the region occupied by the Tamil-speaking race, being about 250 miles west of Madras, and 80 east of the Malabar coast. Mysore bounds it on the north, and the Madras and Tinnevelly districts lie between it and Cape Comorin. Megalithic monuments are found in all the Madras districts, but I am inclined to think are most numerous in Coimbatore, where singly, in twos or threes, or in assemblages of scores or hundreds, they occur in every variety of situation, high on the ghauts and wild mountainsides, in remote jungles and malarious river-valleys, on wide open plains, on cultivated land, amid fertile gardens and rice tracts. Excluding the Nilgiri Hills, which, though belonging to Coimbatore, are a separate region, with a group of remains peculiar to themselves, the Coimbatore monuments are all sepulchral, consisting of kistvaens or tumuli, containing cists or chambers, originally underground, but now often more or less exposed. Stone-circles and standing stones are almost always associated with the tumuli, but never, so far as I know, found independently, as in other parts of India and in Europe. Neither am I aware of any true cromlech in Coimbatore. It may be interesting to give some account of two of the principal assemblages of these remains, one on the east, and another on the west side of the district. Seven miles north of Perămdoŏry, the chief town of a talook of the same name, midway between the towns of Salem and Coimbatore, after passing along a tract of fertile bottom-land, luxuriant with topes and gardens, the ground, iust beyond the village of Năllămpătti, rises into one of the wide rolling barren maidans characteristic of Southern India, on which a great cairn-cemetery is situated. Many hundreds of cairns are spread over a considerable tract; in general appearance heaps of blackened stones, some very small, and thence of every size up to 30 feet and more in diameter, they vary in height from one to four feet, but have evidently been much worn down by lapse of time and weather.

The Sinhalese is one of the Aryan vernaculars of India, and is spoken by the descendants of a people who migrated from Magadha to Ceylon at a very remote period. The tradition recorded in Mahavansa is that Ceylon was colonised, by a prince of Lala, a district of Magadha, who landed in the island with seven hundred followers on the day of Gautama Buddha's death. Accepting this tradition, and comparing it with the tradition that Pali was a Magadha dialect, we should expect to find a close resemblance between Pali and Sinhalese. And such in fact is the case. With a few exceptions, Sinhalese follows Pali so closely that at first sight one might feel inclined to say that the former was derived from the latter. As a general rule, where Pali differs from the other Prakrits, the Sinhalese agrees with it; and this is the case not only with words but with grammatical forms. And there are several words not found in the other Prakrits or Sanskrit which are found in both Pali and Sinhalese. I have alluded to exceptions, and these deserve full consideration; but they are such as may be explained by the circumstance, to which the Buddhist traditions clearly point, that the language of Buddha's sermons was the dialect of one district of Magadha, and the language spoken by the colonisers of Ceylon that of another district. As an instance of these exceptions, I may mention the Sinhalese itiri “woman,” which clearly cannot have come to us through the Pali itthi, since the latter has lost the original r of the Sanskrit .

Evam me sutaṁ. Ekaṁ samayaṁ Bhagavâ Râjagahe viharati Gijjhakûṭe pabbate. Tena kho pana samayena Râjâ Mâgadho Ajâtasattu Vedebiputto Vajjî abhiyâtukâmo hoti, so evam âha. Abam ime Vajjî evarhmabiddbike evammabânubhâve uccheccbâmi Vajjî vinâsessâmi Vajjî anayavyasanam âpâdessâmi Vaiiî ti.

1. I will tell the lucky and evil signs of goats. Such as have eight, nine, or ten teeth, are lucky, and may be kept; such as have seven teeth, should be removed.

2. A black circle on the right side of a white goat is a favourable mark. Likewise a white circle on the right side of one having the colour of an elk, of sable hue, or red.

3. The udderlike part hanging down from the neck of goats is known by the name of “neck ornament.” A goat with one dewlap brings happiness; extremely lucky are those having two or three dewlaps.

4. All goats without horns, and those that are entirely white or entirely black, promise good. Lucky also are such as are half black, half white; or half russet, half black.

5. A goat that marches in front of the flock, and the first that plunges into water, — that has the head white, or blazes on the forehead, — is favourable.

As this valley bas never been visited by an European traveller, the little I have to say about it may make it acceptable to the Society. On one occasion I tried to visit it in company with Dr. Hooker, but unsuccessfully, as, after reaching the top of the Chola Pass—14,900 feet—which leads into it from Sikim, we were met by an officer of the Chinese Government at Lassa, with a military escort, who refused us permission to enter the valley. The particulars I have to state may, I believe, be relied on, as during many years I had constant opportunities of communicating with traders and others residing in the valley, in addition to the officials of the Sikim Raja, who annually sojourned in it from May to November. The route from Darjeeling to Choombi was described by me many years ago, as also the route from it to Lassa; but no one has described the valley itself.

Seventeen years ago the lamented M. Soret published a description of a most interesting silver coin struck at Miṣr in the year of the Flight 525 (A.D. 1130–1), bearing a name Abu-l-Ḳásim Muḥammad Al-Muntaẓar-bi-amri-lláh, which does not appear in the list of the Fáṭimí Khalífahs of Egypt, though the place and date of the coin would certainly lead us to suppose that it was struck by a ruler belonging to this dynasty. A remarkable circumstance is that the coin was struck during the reign of Al-Ḥáfiẓ.

Pulastipura, situated in lat. 7° 56′ N., long. 81° 3′ E., and rather more than 50 miles S.E. of Anurâdhapura, was the capital of Ceylon from the middle of the 8th century to the beginning of the 14th (A.D. 769–1314), and when at the height of its prosperity, during the long and glorious reign of Parâkrama Bâhu the Great, it must have been a city of great size and importance. It is pleasantly situated in the plain, on the shores of one of those numerous artificial lakes which the Sihalese kings loved to dot over the country; and from most of its ruins, as well as from the lake itself, are visible to the S.W. the mountain ranges of Mâtalê, ending in the Hunasgiriya Peak, and to the N.W. the haunted top of Riṭigala.

Kkaráj or Khiráj, for the word is written both ways, indifferently, signifies literally “going or issuing out of.” It occurs, with a slight difference in the spelling, in a passage of the Koran, where two constructions have been put upon it, by commentators — one that it means ajr or hire, and the other that it means nafa, or profit generally. In the former sense, kharáj when applied to land would be rent, and the person rendering it a tenant for the recipient, who would be the proprietor ; in the latter sense, it might be a profit of any kind issuing out of the land, and the person rendering it might himself be the proprietor. To this double meaning of the word may perhaps be traced a controversy respecting the proprietary right to land in India, which has subsisted more or less down to the present time.