WEDDAHS, or VEDDAIIS, descendants of the original inhabitants of Ceylon, win; were conquered and nearly exterminated by the Singhalese, 543 n.c., under Wejaga, the first Singhalese king. They inhabit chiefly the great forests of the interior, and also the most inaccessible parts of the central table-land. They are divided into two tribes, the forest and village Veddahs. The former have neither clothing nor habitations, subsist on wild fruits and animals, and rests on the branches of large trees. The latter, the more civilized, occasionally go down to the lower districts to exchange their game and cattle for rice, cloth, iron, etc. They live in huts of bark and mud, and cultivate the ground, though, like their more savage brethren, they seek their chief subsistence in the forests. They are peaceable, not disposed to begin an insurrection, though easily per suaded to join one. An intelligent Itandyan, who had.been for months in the Veddah country, informed a Wesleyan missionary that the Kandyans call the forest Veddahs leaf Veddalis, because their dress is made of leaves tied with a string, the tillage Veddahs having a piece of cloth half a yard square as their dress; that the former often sleep in hollow trees, of which there are many, and in caves; and that their language is entirely different from that of the latter, which is a kind of Singhalese; that they commonly go two or three together, and have a head man or chief, to whom they render a kind of subjection. Without acknowledging British rule, they pay a small tribute of wild honey,
etc. They have a sort of religion somewhat resembling the Brahmanical. Mr. Boyd, in the Asiatic Annual Register, remarks: "This extraordinary race exhibits the plie noincnon of a people living for a series of ages almost in a state of quiescent barbarism, with the example of arts and civilization almost perpetually before their eyes."