Egyptian kings, to dwarf to the flimsiest
insignificance the proudest engineering works
of the present rulers of India.

Situated amidst the wildest solitudes, or
in the depths of unhealthy jungle districts,
these ruins have remained almost unknown
to Europeans. Surrounded by stagnant
swamps or dense forests and jungle, where
once were fertile plains or luxurious valleys,
rich with waving rice-fields, that in those
remote ages fed a vast population, those
ruined bunds are now the resort of wild
elephants, buffaloes, and innumerable waterfowl.
Here and there a cluster of miserable
huts, termed out of mere courtesy
a village, may be seen vegetating in the less
overgrown corners of this great jungle-water
plain, like islands in some oriental Dead Sea,
but how they came there, or what their inmates
do is not easily defined.

Of the extent of these tanks some idea may
be  formed from the fact of there being at the
present day not fewer than fifteen villages
within the dried up bed of one of them. The
dilapidated wall of this great artificial lake
is fifteen miles in length, extending as it did at
one time completely across the lower end of
a spacious valley. Built up of huge blocks
of stone strongly fixed with cement work,
and covered with turf, it formed a solid barrier
of one hundred feet in width at the base,
shelving off to forty feet wide at the top. The
magnitude of these works bear ample testimony
not only to the ability of the former
craftsmen of this island, but to the extent of
the then population; and the resources and
public spirit of the Cinghalese monarchs, who
could successfully undertake works of such
magnitude and utility. In the early period of
the Christian era, when Britain was in a
semi-barbarous state, when her nobles dwelt
in rude edifices but little removed from
huts, and when her navigators had not learnt
to tempt the perils of an over-sea commerce,
Ceylon, then known as "the utmost Indian
isle, Taprobane," possessed cities of vast extent
as large as the present London- and
housed her monarchs and priests in edifices
that would astonish the architects of our modern
Babylon, that would leave our proudest
palaces far behind, that would need a Milton
to describe and a Martin to delineate. She
was also a liberal exporter of rice to distant
countries. In the present day, with but
a fourth of her former population, Ceylon
is compelled to purchase grain from Indian
producers in consequence of the decay of her
works of irrigation.

It must not be supposed by European
readers, that rice, in the larger acceptation
of the word, is represented by "the finest
Carolina," or even "the best London Cleaned
Patna." There is no more affinity between
those white artificial cereals, and the "real,
original" staple food of India and the
East, than is to be found between a sponge-cake
and a loaf of genuine farmhouse
bread. The truth is, people in this part of
the world, have no conception of what good
rice is like. If they had, there would not be
such a lively demand for the produce of the
Southern American States. But such is prejudice,
that if a merchant were to introduce
into any port of Great Britain, or Ireland, a
cargo of the real staple food of orientals, he
would not find a purchaser for it, so inferior
is it in appearance, in its colour, shape, and
texture, to the better-known and tempting
looking grain of South Carolina.

Perhaps, no greater fallacy exists, than the
common belief in the poverty of the nutritive
qualities of rice. That may hold good
in regard to the rice consumed in this country,
but certainly not, if applied to the common
rice of many parts of the East. A hardworking
Indian labourer would not make a
meal on our "Finest Carolina," if he could
get it as a present: he would know that he
could not do half-a-day's work on it, even
though he swallowed a full Indian allowance,
and that is saying a good deal: an Englishman
in the West, can have no conception of
the prodigious quantities of rice a workingman
in the eastern tropics will dispose of at
one sitting. A London alderman might well
envy him his feeding capacity,

Perhaps, it may be thought, that there is
no such thing as a hard day's work in India:
and that, therefore, there can be no good
grounds for vouching for the nutritive properties
of the grain of those countries. If so,
it makes another of the rather long list of
popular modern fallacies. I have seen as
hard work, real bone and muscle work, done
by citizens of the United Kingdom in the
East, as was ever achieved in the cold West,
and all upon rice and curry—not curry
and rice—in which the rice has formed the real
meal, and the curry has merely helped to
give it a relish, as a sort of substantial Kitchener's
Zest, or Harvey's Sauce. I have
seen, likewise, Moormen, Malabars, and others
of the Indian labouring classes perform a
day's work that would terrify a London porter,
or coal-whipper; or a country navvy, or
ploughman; and under the direct rays of a
sun, that has made a wooden platform too
hot to stand on, in thin shoes, without literally
dancing with pain, as I have done many
a day, within six degrees of the line.

It would be a matter of no little difficulty,
and, perhaps, of doubtful interest, to tell how
many varieties exist of the rice family, in
eastern lands, from the whitest, most delicately
formed table-rice of Bengal, to the
bold, red, solid grain of the Madras coast,
and the sickly-looking, transparent,
good-for-nothing-but-starch rice of Arracan. Making
a rough guess at their number, there cannot
be less than two hundred varieties. These
may be thrown into two great, widely-different
classes, viz., field rice and hill rice: the
distinctive features of which are, that the
former is grown in cultivated fields by the