would be increased in proportion to the influx of
population, and the duties upon enlarged imports would again tend to
swell the revenue of the country.

The felling and clearing of the jungle, which cultivation would render
necessary, would tend, in a great measure, to dispel the fevers and
malaria always produced by a want of free circulation of air. In a
jungle-covered country like Ceylon, diseases of the most malignant
character are harbored in these dense and undisturbed tracts, which
year after year reap a pestilential harvest from the thinly-scattered
population. Cholera, dysentery, fever and small-pox all appear in
their turn and annually sweep whole villages away. I have frequently
hailed with pleasure the distant tope of waving cocoa-nut trees after a
long day's journey in a broiling sun, when I have cantered toward these
shady warders of cultivation in hopes of a night's halt at a village.
But the palms have sighed in the wind over tenantless abodes, and the
mouldering dead have lain beneath their shade. Not a living soul
remaining; all swept away by pestilence; huts recently fallen to decay,
fruits ripening, on the trees, and no hand left to gather them; the
shaddock and the lime falling to the earth to be preyed upon by the
worm, like their former masters. All dead; not one left to tell the
miserable tale.

The decay of the population is still progressing, and the next fifty
years will see whole districts left uninhabited unless something can be
done to prevent it. There is little doubt that if land and water could
be obtained from government in a comparatively healthy and populous
neighborhood, many would migrate to that point from the half-deserted
districts, who might assist in the cultivation of the country instead
of rotting in a closing jungle.

One season of pestilence, even in a large village, paves the road for a
similar visitation in the succeeding year, for this reason:

Say that a village comprising two hundred men is reduced by sickness to
a population of one hundred. The remaining one hundred cannot keep in
cultivation the land formerly open; therefore, the jungle closes over
the surface and rapidly encroaches upon the village. Thus the
circulation of air is impeded and disease again halves the population.
In each successive year the wretched inhabitants are thinned out, and
disease becomes the more certain as the jungle continues to advance.
At length the miserable few are no longe