It only remains to notice the aquatic plants, which are found in greater profusion in the northern and eastern provinces than in any other districts of the island, owing to the innumerable tanks and neglected watercourses which cover the whole surface of this once productive province, but which now only harbour the alligator, or satisfy the thirst of the deer and the elephant.
[Footnote 1: See on this subject LINDLEY'S _Introduction to Botany_, vol. ii. book ii. ch. viii. p. 215.
CARPENTER, _Animal Physiology_, ch. ix. s. 407. CARPENTER'S _Vegetable Physiology_, ch. xi. s. 407, Lond. 1848.]
The chief ornaments of these neglected sheets of water are the large red and white Lotus[1], whose flowers may be seen from a great distance reposing on their broad green leaves. In China and some parts of India the black seeds of these plants, which are not unlike little acorns in shape, are served at table in place of almonds, which they are said to resemble, but with a superior delicacy of flavour. At some of the tanks where the lotus grows in profusion in Ceylon, I tasted the seeds enclosed in the torus of the flowers, and found them white and delicately-flavoured, not unlike the small kernel of the pine cone of the Apennines. This red lotus of the island appears to be the one that Herodotus describes as abounding in the Nile in his time, but which is now extinct; with a flower resembling a rose, and a fruit in shape like a wasp's nest, and containing seeds of the size of an olive stone, and of an agreeable flavour.[2] But it has clearly no identity with those which he describes as the food of the Lotophagi of Africa, of the size of the mastic[3], sweet as a date, and capable of being made into wine.
[Footnote 3: The words are "[Greek: Esti megathos hoson te tês schinou]" (Herod. b. iv. s. 177); and as [Greek: schinos] means also a _squill_ or a _sea-onion_, the fruit above referred to, as the food of the Lotophagi, must have been of infinitely larger size and in every way different from the lotus of the Nile, described in the 2nd book, as well as from the lotus in the East. Lindley records the conjecture that the article referred to by Herodotus was the _nabk_, the berry of the lote-bush (_Zizyphus lotus_), which the Arabs of Barbary still eat. (_Vegetable Kingdom_, p. 582.)]