KANDY LAKE, SHOWING LIBRARY AND OCTAGON

CHAPTER VV.

AGRICULTURE.

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J. C. WILLIS, M.A., F.L.S., Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens.

'YLON, speaking broadly, is entirely dependent
upon agriculture for its prosperity. Fishing,
plumbago mining, gemming, and other pursuits
not connected with agriculture do indeed
support a number of its people, but the
enormous majority are either directly engaged
in the cultivation of the soil or in industrial work dependent
upon agriculture, such as tea manufacture, basket weaving,
oilmaking, carpentry, transportation of agricultural products,
&amp;c. The native inhabitants are naturally a race of tillers of
the soil, living in little villages of a few hundred people. It
is true that the interior contains many small towns with
populations of 2,000 to 8,000, but the majority of these are
in the tea districts, and their growth is due to the enterprise
of European planters, which has created new industries with
a great export trade,
The Sinhalese or Tamil villager, living on his ancestral
lands, cultivates, as his fathers cultivated, with cheap and
primitive tools, the few products necessary for his simple
mode of life. On the irrigated land or *“fields,” as distinguished
 from the unirrigated or « high” land, he grows the
rice or paddy which forms the staple of his food. His little
but stands on the high land, and is usually surrounded
by a wilderness of trees and plants of many kinds, among