TRANSPORT.

15

making the embankment at Paduvil would be sufficient to
form an English railway 120 miles long, and its completion
would occupy 10.000 men for more than five years.”
It is estimated that on the completion of the eighteen irrigation
 works now in hand at a cost of Rs. 5,000,000, more
than 162,000 acres, or 250 square miles of land, now mostly
covered with scrub jungle, will be added to the irrigable
and the cultivable area in the Colony.
The restoration and maintenance of these gigantic works
and of the thousands of minor tanks and channels. some

CEYLON DHOBIES AT WORK,

dependent on the large works and others self-contained, is
one of the tasks to which the British Government has
addressed itself with unswerving assiduity, especially during
the last thirty years, and a result is being slowly but surely
reaped, in abundance where before was famine, health in
the place of sickness, and golden fields of corn where once
roamed the elephant and the bear ; townships have taken the
place of squalid huts, and a robust population now tills the
orstwhile impenetrable jungle, where darkness and gloom
reigned supreme and over which brooded the fiend malaria,

Transport.

The traveller to Ceylon has the choice of numerous good
and swift steamship lines to Colombo, which is distant 7,083
miles from London vid Suez and Aden. The four great mail