relics were sometimes accessible, and shown to the public on festal occasions[1] and unless they were contained in some external case like this it is not easy to see how they could be got at. A third indispensable part of a perfect dagoba was an enclosing rail. All the early dagobas and all the sculptured representations possess this adjunct. In the rock-cut examples and in the later structural ones the rail becomes attached to the building as a mere ornament, but is never omitted.
224. Dolmen at Pullicondah.[1]
If we compare such a sepulchral mound as this at Pullicondah, near Madras,[2] or that represented in section, woodcut No. 211, with the Lanka or Thupa Ramayana dagobas, we cannot fail to be struck with their similarity. Both possess the mound, the rail, and the tee; and in this last instance it is a simulated tomb, such as many in Europe are suspected of having been. That a people might both bury in barrows and erect domical cairns to contain relics would not necessarily involve a proof of the one form being copied from the other; but that both should be surmounted by a simulated sarcophagus or shrine, and both surrounded by one, two, or three rows of useless stones, points to a direct imitation of the one from the other which can hardly be accidental.
