Travelling makes us feel the narrow boundaries which have been set for the working of man’s brain. Wander over the face of the earth and you will find the same proverbs, the same fairy-tales, the same legends, the same ghosts, the same superstitions—even the same jokes. You will find the stories of Boccaccio and the “Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles” repeated in China and Japan. In all these cases the difference is only in the clothing in which local custom dresses them. So with religious offerings: we lay our roses and lilies and violets upon the altar; the Singhalese brings the champak; the idea is the same. Flowers and lamps! Like the vestal virgins, all men light fire in their sacred places. Other relics were given by King Asoka. Dagobas were raised to contain these—colossal structures of solid brickwork with a tiny receptacle for the sacred treasure. So the new religion flourished greatly and the piety of successive kings founded great monasteries containing thousands of monks, little heeding that these comfortable homes were the negation of a rule as strict as that of St. Francis, which enjoined upon the yellow-robed shavelings no better dwelling than a “pansala,” a shelter of leaves. Fancy and imagination are wonderful architects, but it is hard even for them to build up a semblance of the glories of Anuradhapura as they must have been in the days when the great Brazen Palace, of which the sixteen hundred jagged stone pillars still stand, upheld a colony of some two thousand monks in its nine stories: days when, scattered over the vast plain, buildings the magnificence of which is witnessed in the sculptured stones, seven-headed Nagas, and elaborately carved moonstones, huge half discs of granite decorated with processions of elephants, lions, horses and the sacred goose (hansa), and scroll-work that is almost Italian in feeling, rose at the bidding of an art which had reached its zenith when we were still in darkness. Gold, precious gems, and colours were used in profusion to adorn what is now the mere wreckage of a past barbaric grandeur, swallowed up in the riotous vegetation of the tropics. Fa Hsien bears eloquent witness to the wealth of flowers used in the worship at the temples, and the richness of the innumerable royal gardens is a matter of history. As regards the authenticity of the Bō tree, Tennent argues well that it must be the identical tree and no substitute planted to replace one that had died. Had that tree, sacred throughout the East, died, its death could not have been concealed; the emotion created by the news would have been too deep. The story of the loss must have penetrated furthest Asia.