Had it not been for the learned curiosity of Mr. Turnour, the Mahawanso, the great epic poem of Ceylon, the Book of Kings of the island, would perhaps never have been deciphered, and the secrets of the ruins of Anuradhapura would have remained as great a riddle as those of Stonehenge or the Rollright Stones. Although the reading of the Mahawanso did not present the same gigantic difficulties as the cuneiform inscriptions of Nineveh, it was yet a task of great difficulty. The records were kept by priests; they were written in Pali, the language of the Buddhist priesthood, imperfectly understood by themselves, but in diction so mystic and obscure that the ancient scribes found it necessary to write a commentary, or translation into the vulgar tongue of the dark original. This _tika_, as it was called, appears to have been lost until about the year 1826, when it was discovered among a collection of manuscripts which were given to Mr. Turnour by the high priest of Saffragam. Even the priests, lazy and ignorant, could make nothing of the precious legacy of their predecessors. Once he was possessed of the invaluable clue, Mr. Turnour’s task must have been comparatively lightened. Still it remained a great feat, thanks to which we are the richer by a human document of the highest interest. Sir James Emerson Tennent’s account of Mr. Turnour and his labours is well worth reading. Strip the old Pali Poem of its monkish legends and fairy tales, and we have the authentic story of an ancient civilization, some five hundred years older than our own era. It is the tale of men who lived and loved and hated and fought; of men who bought and sold and were moved by the same greed of gain, the same passions, the same ambitions that move us to-day. Whatever their faults or their crimes may have been, all that they did was on a colossal scale. Their ideas were magnificent, heroic. When in the sixth century before Christ, the great conqueror Wijayo came from India as a merchant and established his power in Ceylon, the first need was to assure the food supply of the island, which up to that time had been mainly dependent upon imported rice; food meant agriculture, and agriculture meant irrigation; hence those vast reservoirs in which the great crocodiles still lurk, basking lazily on the sunburnt rocks at Anuradhapura. Two hundred years later came the Apostle of Buddhism, Mahindo.