406 DR. OTTO STAPF ON THE 
bamboo, erect, solitary, about 1-2 yards apart, occupied the ground almost exclusively, 
with no jungle under them, and shut out all view. The stems were, by recollection, 
14 in. in diam., about 30 feet high, leafy at the top, yellow, with spines at every node. 
The specimen now in Kew has no piece of the stem, but it has the note, made on the 
day of collection, mentioning the thorns on the stems. Though the stems stood a yard 
ov two apart, the jangle was most tedious to penetrate, unless you allowed the clothes to 
be torn from your back and the flesh from your bones. I noted the plant at the time 
as a species different from the Welocanna bambusoides of Herb. Kew. (in which I was 
possibly right, as I then knew the latter by sight). In the jungle covered by this thorny 
Melocanna, which came into fruit all simultaneously after growing 40 years or so 
vegetatively, it would be difficult to place a plane table so that the seeds should not fall 
on it. It is a most dreary country to march in; when you reach the top of a hill, there 
is no look out.” 
II. HABIT OF MELOCANNA BAMBUSOIDES. 
Melocanna bambusoides is described by Gamble (‘Indian Bambusee,’ p. 118) as “an 
evergreen, arboreous bamboo, with single distant culms arising from the ramifications of 
an underground rhizome. Culmstall.... unbranched till near the top, 50-70 feet high, 
15 to 3in. in diameter.... Owing to its habit of sending out long underground 
rhizomes which give out culms at intervals, it spreads very rapidly and is extremely 
difficult to get rid of.” Like many other bamboos it loses its foliage when it begins to 
flower (Roxburgh, Plant. Coromand. iii. p. 38). When finally deprived of all its leaves 
the top with its numerous inflorescences borne on the gigantic culm, as on a peduncle, 
presents a singular appearance, which suggested to Kurz “an ample, after the fall of the 
leaves, radical panicle ” (Forest Flora of Burmah, ii. p. 569). Kurz went too far in thus 
reducing the whole of the flowering culm to a single panicle, and it appears to me 
certainly more expedient to confine the term “ inflorescence " to the dense aggregations 
of spikelets whieh terminate the flowering branches above a succession of perfect leaves 
(with early deciduous blades) and to their lateral and basal homologues, whether they are 
preceded by perfect leaves or not. "These flowering branches are gathered in fascicles 
springing from the nodes of the culm and its branches in the region of the top of the 
bamboo. They vary not only in size and number, but also very considerably in structure 
and habit,as a comparison of Roxburgh's and Gamble's plates will show, so much so, 
indeed, that the figures depicted there suggest distinct species. In reality, they repre- 
sent only the two types of inflorescence of which the fascicles are made up, either 
so as to contain only inflorescences of one kind or a combination of both. One set of 
inflorescences may be described as androdynamous, namely predominantly or exclusively 
male, the other as gynodynamous, namely predominantly or exclusively female, herina- 
phrodite flowers occurring occasionally in either. Intermediate forms exist, but they 
'are very rare. There are consequently three conditions possible in the grouping of the 
inflorescences : Loi uniformly androdynamous fascicles, (b) uniformly gynodynamous 
fascicles, and (c) mixed fascicles. How they are distributed over the top of the bamboo, 
or whether there is ever an approach to dicecism, I cannot say. The fruits are, of course, 
