36 THE BAMBOO GARDEN CHAP. 
daily newspapers of a recent show of cycles says, “No one 
would credit, until after actual trial, the strength and rigidity 
which the bamboo cycles possess, coupled at the same time 
with a definite amount of increased comfort.” 
The latest honour achieved by a Bamboo is (according to a 
Birmingham paper) that of having furnished to a church in 
Shanghai a set of organ pipes which, for softness and mellow- 
ness of tone, outdo all others. 
In the superstitions of the world the Bamboo has its 
place. Rumpf, who died in the year 1693, says, in his 
Herbarium Amboinense, that the Malays in his time believed 
that the first man sprang from the hollow stem of the Bamboo, 
The Garrows, a race inhabiting the western extremity of the 
mountain range at the bend of the Burrampooter, whom Sir 
Joseph Hooker describes in his Himalayan Journals as a 
savage race, given to human sacrifices and polyandry, are 
said by De Gubernatis in his Mythologie des Plantes to have 
neither temple nor altar. They erect before their huts a 
pillar of Bamboo, which they decorate with flowers and cotton 
and offer up sacrifice to the divinity in front of it. 
In some Eastern countries the rarely recurrent flowering 
of the Bamboos is regarded as a sure presage of great calamity. 
The North Borneo Herald of 1st August 1894 has a paragraph 
upon the subject in connection with the terrible visitation of 
the plague which ravaged Hong-Kong in 1894. 
THE BLoom oN THE BAamMBoo 
A Hong-Kong paper has the following note: The bloom on the 
Bamboo has indeed proved an unerring portent of evil in this year of 
disaster. It is well known as a rare phenomenon in the botanical 
world, and is always in the Oriental mind associated with impending 
