everywhere at the present day, so it is at least likely that the top storeys are faithfully depicted too. Such a building is also occasionally found on a stone used for certain purposes of daily life (see p. 87).

Passing onward again we see to the left a forest of columns, once a house for priests, and to the right the Dalada Maligawa, Temple of the Tooth, easily recognised by the odd capitals of its columns (see p. 65).

The Tooth-relic was brought to Ceylon in A.D. 311, long after Dutugemunu's time, by a Brahman princess, but it was lodged in an already existing building of King Tissa, so parts of this ruin may be as old as anything else in the city. The relic was regarded as so peculiarly sacred that it was carried away for safety during the worst Tamil raids. It accompanied the court whenever the king had sufficient power to take it with him, and was lodged at all the various capitals of the kingdom from time to time. Occasionally, when the monks had reason to distrust their monarch's good faith, they, who had access to it, carried it off themselves, until he came to reason. It was not even safe from members of the royal household, for in the time of the great Parakrama it was stolen by his aunt, and he had considerable difficulty in getting it back from her before she carried it off to India. It was stolen and actually taken to India in the fourteenth century, but was restored after the Cingalese monarch himself, Parakrama III, had been over to the mainland to plead for it in person. The story of this, the most sacred relic of all to Buddhists, is a most

enthralling one, and it is a pity it is not accessible in English. The adventures of the Tooth are, indeed, recorded in Elu, the classical language of the Cingalese, in the Dhatuwansa, a work mentioned in the Mahawansa and still extant, but even in translation the style of this would not appeal to English readers. From golden caskets set with jewels, raised above bowing, swaying, adoring multitudes, to the hair of a princess's head or the saffron folds of a priest's robe as places of hurried concealment, the story runs. From temples of granite, decorated with gold and silver, to windy caves on bare hillsides and holes in the depths of jungles the Tooth has wandered. It is said to have been rescued from the funeral pyre of Buddha by Khema the sage, and eventually brought to Ceylon concealed in the hair of the princess, who was of Kalinga lineage, a race that gave more than one king to Ceylon. The feat must have been difficult, for the fantastic size of this much-prized relic robs it in unprejudiced eyes of any possible claim to be what it represents to be, though its great age and the reverence bestowed upon it invest it with peculiar interest. The tooth is very seldom seen indeed by Europeans. It is enclosed in many caskets and guarded at Kandy, where it is carried in procession every year at the great festival or Perahera, which now takes place in August. But though the original cannot be seen, there is a model in Colombo museum, which shows exactly what it is like. It is held up by a wire, which encircles it and springs from the heart of a lotus-flower after the usual fashion for such relics in Burma as well as Ceylon. The tooth

is about two inches in length, and the thickness and shape of a man's little finger, and if a tooth at all, is possibly the fossil one of some animal. Just such a shape, though a little smaller, is the precious "tooth-relic" in the Queen's Monastery, Mandalay, which I myself have seen. Whatever the original relic of Ceylon may have been, the truth about the present one cannot be doubtful. It is said by one account that the Portuguese destroyed the genuine relic in their raid on Kandy in 1560, and that the loss was concealed and denied by the monks, who substituted the present relic. It may be so, for there is no inherent impossibility in the fact of the genuine relic having been brought over to the island originally, though, in that case, it is at least strange that those clever monks did not model the new tooth on the old, and make it of some shape that might possibly once have been found in a human mouth.

The natural scepticism felt by the West toward all such relics must, however, be discounted, when just recently (1916) Sir John Marshall, DirectorGeneral of Archæology in India, whose testimony cannot be gainsaid, has found, at the ancient city of Taxila, twenty-five miles north-west of Rawal Pindi, the third set of the relics distributed after Buddha's death. The account of that event, usually accepted by Buddhists, tells that when the flesh had been consumed on the funeral pyre, but before the bones had been destroyed, a heavy shower of rain fell and put the fire out. Thereupon much discussion arose as to the custody of the remains. It was eventually agreed that they should be divided into eight lots and distributed

widely, so that cairns, or dagabas, might be raised over them. This was done. Two of such sets have already been unearthed, one at Piprava in the Terai in 1898, one at Kanishka near Peshawar in 1914, and now the third set has been unearthed with an inscription, proving, at any rate, what it was supposed to be. The curious feature of this find is that Sir John Marshall was led to the spot by following the account given by the Chinese pilgrim, Hiuen Tsiang, of his visit to Taxila in the seventh century.

There is comparatively little said in the Chronicles about the advent of the Tooth at Anuradhapura, as compared with the account of the advent of the Bo-tree, or the Collarbone, the two other of the city's most precious relics. Yet of the three the Tooth is now regarded more as the actual core and centre of the Buddhist community than even the Bo-tree itself.

The inner shrine of the Dalada Maligawa, in which this relic was probably bestowed, is the one in which appear the very curiously crowned columns already alluded to. The open "lanterns" of these are supposed to represent a tooth; if they represent anything, it is a hollow double tooth, which, in this case, is not appropriate. They cannot be said to be nearly as graceful as the usual style of capital found here, and "curious" is the only word that can fitly be applied to them. The entrance to the outer building shows a fine moonstone, and balustrades or wings of the most common type.

Close to the ruined temple is the white dome of Thuparama, held to be of great sacredness as the