felt himself near his end, he sent to his brother Sumitra, who meanwhile had succeeded his father on the throne of Sinhapura, to come to Lanka, in order to govern the new kingdom. Sumitra preferred to keep his ancestral throne, but sent his youngest son, Panduvançadeva, who reigned over the island for 30 years, and founded the new metropolis of Anuradhapura in the interior of the island. Pandukabhya, the second successor of Panduvançadeva, arranged the constitution of the kingdom. He set up a Brahman as high priest, and had the boundaries of the villages measured. When enlarging the metropolis, he caused dwellings to be erected for the Brahmans, before the city, as the law requires, and made a place for corpses, and near it built a special village for the impure persons who tend the dead. Settlements were also erected for the penitents. The immigrants formed the castes of the Brahmans and the Kshatriyas; the original inhabitants, who submitted to the Brahman law, formed the castes of the Vaiçyas and Çudras; a special caste, the Paravas, we find, at any rate at a later time, entrusted with the pearl fisheries. But Pandukabhya is said not to have confined himself to the Arians in conferring offices; tradition expressly informs us that chiefs of the ancient inhabitants received prominent posts in the new constitution.[494] We should deceive ourselves if we found in this tradition a credible and certain narrative of the colonisation of Ceylon. The name of the discoverer Vijaya, means victory and conquest; that of his successor, Panduvançadeva, means god of the race of Pandu. In this tradition we can only maintain the fact that the first settlers came from the west of India, the coast of Guzerat; that a family from this region, which claimed descent from the celebrated Pandu, acquired the dominion over the island (the Greeks are acquainted with a kingdom of Pandus on the peninsula of Guzerat, and the kingdom of Pandæa on the southern apex of India); that the settlers in Ceylon entered into combination with the older colony on the south coast of the Deccan, and, in contrast to these, their fellow-tribesmen, formed a friendly relation with the whole of the ancient inhabitants. Nor can we repose absolute faith in the tradition of the Singhalese, which places the arrival of the first settlers in the year 543 B.C. This year, which is the year of Buddha's death, is obviously chosen because Ceylon from the middle of the third century B.C. was a chief seat of Buddhism, and continued to be so when their doctrine had been repressed and annihilated by the Brahmans in the land of the Ganges, and on the whole mainland of India. Down to the period of the introduction of Buddhism into Ceylon, and even for fully a hundred years afterwards, the chronology of Singhalese authorities abounds with impossibilities, contradictions, and demonstrable mistakes.[495] We must therefore content ourselves with the assumption