BAMBUSA PALMATA 
A STRIKINGLY beautiful and most effective species, conspicuous 
from the great size of its leaves, which are often used by 
Japanese peasants to wrap up the bit of salt fish or other 
condiment which they eat with their rice. 
The culms with me are about 5 feet high, and bieins an 
inch in circumference. Their colour is bright green powdered 
with waxy bloom, especially below the internodes. The main 
part of the stem is round, but it is much flattened at the top. 
The nodes are not very prominent; and the sheaths, which 
early in life fade to straw colour, are very persistent half- 
way up the internode, which is from 5 to 6 inches long, vary- 
ing little in length over the greater part of the stem. The 
fistulous character of the stem is inconspicuous at its base, 
but towards the middle of the culm the pipe is about an eighth 
of an inch in diameter. The hairless sheaths, which adhere 
closely to the stem, are surmounted by a small equally hair- 
less ligule and a limbus or blade, which is often very minute 
and always shortlived. I can detect no true cross veins in 
the sheaths, which with their broad parallel veins, dotted 
with pellucid glands, greatly resemble the underground sheaths 
of ARUNDINARIA SIMONI. The limbus, however, is quite 
conspicuously tessellated. The lgule is fringed, but so 
