senior medical officer of the Kandyan provinces.]

[Footnote 7: _An Account of the Interior of Ceylon_, &c., by JOHN DAVY,
M.D. 4to, London, 1821.]

Here the long series of writers is broken, just at the commencement of a
period the most important and interesting in the history of the island.
The mountain zone, which for centuries had been mysteriously hidden from
the Portuguese and Dutch[1] was suddenly opened to British enterprise in
1815. The lofty region, from behind whose barrier of hills the kings of
Kandy had looked down and defied the arms of three successive European
nations, was at last rendered accessible by the grandest mountain road
in India; and in the north of the island, the ruins of ancient cities,
and the stupendous monuments of an early civilisation, were discovered
in the solitudes of the great central forests. English merchants
embarked in the renowned trade in cinnamon, which we had wrested from
the Dutch; and British capitalists introduced the cultivation of coffee
into the previously inaccessible highlands. Changes of equal magnitude
contributed to alter the social position of the natives; domestic
slavery was extinguished; compulsory labour, previously exacted from the
free races, was abolished; and new laws under a charter of justice
superseded the arbitrary rule of the native chiefs. In the course of
less than half a century, the aspect of the country became changed, the
condition of the people was submitted to new influences; and the time
arrived to note the effects of this civil revolution.

[Footnote 1: VALENTYN, In his great work on the Dutch possessions in
India, _Oud_ _en Nieuw Oost-Indien_, alludes more than once with regret
to the ignorance in which his countrymen were kept as to the interior of
Ceylon, concerning which their only information was obtained through