* I particularly directed my researches to such parts of the history and of the antiquities of the island as were connected with the state of the country between the third and the thirteenth centuries of the Christian era, when the immense tanks or reservoirs of water, called Kattocarre, Padwielcolom, Minerie, and Kandeley, in the northern districts, and the three large tanks in the eastern districts, together with between three and four thousand smaller tanks, were kept in perfect repair by the then government of the island, and formed as grand and as beneficial a system of irrigation as ever prevailed in any country, not excepting even Egypt, while the celebrated lake Moeris was in use for regulating the inundations of the Nile.
My view in instituting these inquiries was to obtain for his Majesty's Ministers such information as might enable them to carry into effect a plan which I proposed to the late Lord Londonderry, the then Secretary of State for the Colonies, in 1809; the object of which was, to encourage European capitalists, by giving them grants upon the most advantageous terms of such of the government lands as were in former days highly cultivated though at present completely waste, to introduce into Ceylon European capital, European industry, and European arts and sciences, and thereby restore the population, the agriculture, and the commerce of the island to the state of prosperity which they had attained when Ceylon, according to the concurrent testimony of historians, had a population of between four and five millions of inhabitants, a system of agriculture which enabled it to supply not only its own but the population of neighbouring countries with rice and many other descriptions of grain, and a system of commerce which made it, for many centuries, the great emporium of all the trade which was carried on between the western and eastern portions of the globe.
See the different papers upon this subject given by me to the late Lord Londonderry in 1809, and to Lord Goderich in 1831; and also my two papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Asiatic Society: the one on a Cufic and the other on the Trincomalee Inscriptions.
