IV USES—CUSTOMS—SUPERSTITIONS 31 
idea of the quantity of silica contained in Bamboos may be 
gathered from the fact recorded that one species, Bambusa 
Tabacaria, will emit sparks when struck with an axe. 
House, furniture, art, clothes, arms, food, and medicine, 
what does this wonderful plant not supply? And it is all so 
cheap, too ; for the materials of a common dwelling-house in 
the south of China cost about twenty-five dollars !! 
Near the Malay villages, where the houses are carried 
upon poles above the red teeming swamp, like the old 
lacustrine dwellings, there is sure to be a Bamboo grove. 
Towards evening, when the fresh sea-borne breeze drives 
the burning stillness of the day before it, bringing to the 
poor washed-out natives a faint renewal of energy, weird 
and ghostly strains come floating upon the air. It is no 
mortal music, for Atjolus himself is the musician, rivalling 
the great god Pan of old. In one of the hollow stems of the 
erove holes have been pierced, some greater and some less, 
one in each joint; through these the Wind-God breathes 
fitful wailing sounds, now deep like the pedal notes of an 
organ, now soft as a fairy’s flute. This is Bulu Perindu, the 
plaintive Bamboo, the analogue of the AXolian harp.’ 
Strange to say, the Bamboo played an important, though, 
fortunately, inconspicuous, part in the history of European 
industry. In the sixth century, when Justinian was reigning 
at Constantinople, the court reserved to itself a monopoly of 
the silk trade and of its manufacture, the looms being 
worked by women in the Imperial Palace. Up to that 
time the silkworms that feed upon the leaves of the white 
1 Compare Williams’s Middle Kingdom, vol. i. p. 360. 
2 Compare Sir Emerson Tennant’s Ceylon, vol. i.; Munro, p. 2. 
