348 FURTHER INDIA. BOOK VIII. A crowd of smaller pagodas of all sizes, from 30 ft. to 200 ft. in height, surrounds the larger one ; in fact there is scarcely a village in the country that does not possess one or two of these structures, and in all the more important towns they are numbered by hundreds ; indeed, they may almost be said to be innumer- able. They are almost all quite modern, and so much alike as 447- View of Pagoda in Rangoon. (From a Photograph. not to merit any distinct or separate mention. They indicate, however, a great degree of progressive wealth and power in the nation, from the earliest times to the present day, and an increas- ing prevalence of the Buddhistic system. This is a direct con- trast to the history of Ceylon, whose glory was greatest in the earliest centuries of the Christian Era and was losing its purity at the time when the architectural history of Burma first dawns
