I was loth to leave the wilds without obtaining a glimpse of the Veddahs, those primitive savages whom the Indian Conqueror, Wijayo, drove into the forests and rock caves which are still their lairs, just as Jimmu Tennō, perhaps a century earlier, had hunted the Ainus of Japan. There is no doubt that these are the lineal descendants of the ancient Yakkos described in the Mahawanso, of the truthfulness of which they are a living proof. The testimony is reciprocal. No wonder that the Brahmans in all their pride of race and high breeding should have looked upon these hideous and degraded savages as Demons. Perhaps nowhere on the face of this earth does there exist a more untamed race. They know no God and have no religion; a few guttural sounds, which are their only means of communication, can scarcely be called a language. Twelve arrows were once given to them to be distributed equally among four recipients. There was no man among their chiefs who was capable of so abstruse a calculation. Their food is of the filthiest, though they cook the flesh of the monkeys and giant lizards which are their most relished dainties—the former almost cannibalism. Their weapons are the bow and a sort of rude hatchet; their clothes as little as maybe; they have not to contend with cold, and decency is the least of their cares. In their persons they are appallingly ugly and repulsive. Their misshapen limbs are deformed, their mouths and teeth animal and revolting. Long and filthy matted black hair, and in the men beards, reach to their middle, falling in tangled strands. Such is the description given of them by Tennent and others. The picture of a race belonging to a prehistoric age, to a long since forgotten world. And yet in spite of all this, so great is the respect paid to pedigree by the Singhalese, ashamed of their mixed ancestry, that these degraded but pure-raced outcasts are looked upon as beings of a high caste, their very barbarism shrouding them in the glamour of eld. How many of these poor wretches there may be cannot be reckoned with accuracy; among scattered tribes living in hiding-places no census is possible. In the opinion of an old and well-informed settler in Ceylon, they do not exceed two thousand—if indeed there are as many. It is not too much to say that the Veddahs are one of the greatest of human curiosities. It is difficult to think of a race living for twenty-five centuries unchanged, untouched by any vestige of progress, and that too, not cast away upon a desert island—not lost like Stanley’s pygmies in the baneful swamps of the dark African forest, but living cheek by jowl with five successive civilizations, the Brahman, the Buddhist, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. It is difficult to believe that as time speeds on some measure of civilization will not at last penetrate even this survival of the unfittest.