on the opposite coasts, evading the dangerous voyage round Cape Comorin. The avoidance of circumpeninsular navigation was a habit of ancient travelling. The little Cornish peninsula and the Jutland peninsula were thus short-circuited at one time or another. So too was peninsular India. Strabo in the time of Augustus wrote (15. 1. 4) that in his day only stray individuals had sailed round India to the Ganges and that they were 'of no use as regards the history of the places they had seen'. Pliny, as already related, had no recent knowledge of Ceylon until the embassy from the king of the island came to Rome with scrappy information in the time of Claudius. The Periplus becomes noticeably vague when, southbound, it leaves Nelcynda on the Malabar coast. Indeed Ptolemy, in the middle of the 2nd century A.D., is our first circumstantial authority for those parts, and it has been observed that, in writing of Ceylon, he appears to have been making a display of information that was largely new to his reader. It is a fair inference that the Roman agencies established in the east coast ports under Augustus and Tiberius were, so far as the Westerners were concerned, the termini of trans-peninsular routes, and that only towards the end of the 1st century were the western and eastern ports linked also by regular circumpeninsular traffic. Consistently with this, no coins earlier than Nero and Vespasian are recorded from Ceylon.

If there are, then, clear geographical reasons for the short-circuiting of wealth and traffic through Coimbatore, it is fair to ask why did so appreciable a proportion of it come to rest there? The question cannot at present be answered. According to an unconfirmed but plausible Tamil tradition, the three ancient kingdoms of South India-Chola, Chera and Pandya- met in the Coimbatore district, and such a convergence of frontiers, providing alternative escapes, is at all times a favourite focus of brigandage. The hiding and loss of some part of this bullion would fit easily enough into that picture. Other hoards may represent the forgotten treasury of local prospectors and miners concerned with the famous beryl mines of the district, or of the owners of the pepper estates which doubtless spread, as to-day, on and below the 3,000-ft. contour in the fringes of the district. There is reason to suppose that search would reveal ample evidence of occupation hereabouts and excavation is now the necessary preliminary to further knowledge. Only at the eastern end of the zone, on the Coromandel Coast, has serious digging so far been attempted, and here the results have been immediate and dramatic.

Two miles south of Pondicherry, the capital of French India, a former outlet of the Gingee river forms a lagoon locked to-day by