where he remained till 1850. In a response to an economic depression that severely affected growers and merchants for coffee and cinnamon, he persuaded Earl Grey, Secretary of State for Colonies in London to shift the burden of the colony's tax revenue from export duties to imposts on guns, dogs, carts, and shops, and to a tax to be paid in lieu of compulsory labour on plantation roads. The policy sharpened the plight of the progressively dispossessed peasantry and increased the pressure upon them to submit to wage labour, their resistance to which had forced cash-crop planters to import large numbers of Tamil "coolies" from southern India. The resulting tensions contributed to the Matale Rebellion of 1848. Emerson Teennet's reflections on his residence in Ceylon appeared in Christianity in Ceylon (1850) and Ceylon, Physical, Historical and Topographical (2 vols., 1859). The latter was illustrated by his protégé, fellow Ulsterman Andrew Nicholl. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes to it the first use in English of "rogue elephant", a translation of the Sinhala term wal aliya. He was elected the second President of the newly formed Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, serving from 1846 to 1857. Last years On his return to the United Kingdom, he became member for Lisburn, and under Lord Derby was secretary to the Poor Law Board in 1852. From 1852 till 1867 he was permanent secretary to the Board of Trade, and on his retirement he was created a baronet of Tempo Manor in the Chapelry of Tempo in the County of Fermanagh. In 1862, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Emerson Tennent died in London on 6 March 1869. His family consisted of two daughters and a son, Sir William Emerson Tennent, who was an official in the Board of Trade, and at whose death the baronetcy became extinct. Besides the books above mentioned, Emerson Tennent wrote Belgium in 1840 (1841), and Wine: its Duties and Taxation (1855), Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon (1861), The Wild Elephant and The Method Of Capturing It in Ceylon (1867), and was a contributor to magazines and a frequent correspondent of Notes and Queries. He was a friend of both Charles Dickens and it was to Emerson Tennent that Dickens dedicated his last completed novel Our Mutual Friend (1865). James Emerson Tennent is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of Sri