The aborigines are like so much material without capital or tools to fashion it. For in a country such as this, where there are so many profitable {64} ways of employing money and labour, few can be found willing to furnish either of these requisites for this work of benevolence and unsought justice. It is said that nothing can be effected among the adult natives. But the colony has now been in the possession of the English 31 years, and if the then parents had been induced to give up their children for training, or even if they had given them up three or four years after, when they had got to know us as a friendly people, there would now be few of them in the settled districts but such as would have had the opportunity of being civilized. ANNE CAMFIELD. CEYLON. In reply to Miss Nightingale’s question, “Whether we can civilize the native people without killing them?” it is gratifying to be able to assure her, that in Ceylon the native population, both of Singhalese and Tamil race, instead of declining and dying off before the European settlers, is rapidly increasing, and that the number both of our schools and scholars would be far greater than it is, if only we had the means of maintaining them at command. J. COLOMBO. The steady increase of population, however, except perhaps in the remotest districts, which education in any form has not yet reached, inclines me to believe that schools, whether conducted on the native or English systems, have proved an unqualified benefit to the people, and that, instead of inducing or extending disease of any kind, many of those enumerated in Miss Nightingale’s list being unknown in Ceylon, they have, by even temporarily withdrawing those who by reason of their tender age are most subject to the injurious consequences of bad habits and premature exertion, secured for them a remarkable immunity from the prevailing diseases of the country for the remainder of their lives. C. P. LAYARD, Govt. Agent. [Sidenote: See Tables V. and W., pp. 50 and 51.] The principal civil medical officer has prepared returns to show the diseases of the Singhalese and mixed races, and of the Malabars. The deaths among the latter are in the proportion of 20 per cent. against 8 per cent. among the former. This remarkable disproportion in the mortality may be accounted for by the starving condition in which the Malabar coolies generally arrive in this colony; their uncleanly habits; their abstinence from animal food, and, as a consequence, the low standard of their vital organization; and exposure without sufficient clothing in the cold climate of the hills. They sink rapidly under attacks of diarrhœa, dysentery, and anasarca.