BAMBUSA PYGMAA 
WHEN one looks back upon the giant Bamboos of the Tropics 
it is difficult to believe that this pigmy is any relation of those 
monster grasses. The culms are from 6 inches to a foot, or 
a little more, in length. They are bright green in colour, but 
purple and flattened at the top, very slender, round, and with 
an extremely diminutive pipe, slightly zigzagged from knot to 
knot. The nodes are purple, prominent, and furnished with a 
protective band of waxy bloom round the base. The inter- 
nodes are sometimes rather over an inch long. The sheaths 
have a small arched ligule, armed with very minute hairs, 
and a tiny limbus. I fail to detect any tessellation in either 
sheath or limbus. The branches, which are borne singly or 
in pairs on the nodes, are very long in proportion to the size of 
the stem, to which they give a false appearance of being many- 
branched. The leaves, which are sometimes as much as 5 inches 
long by three-quarters of an inch wide, are a brilliant green, 
very regularly tessellated, serrated on both edges; and the 
upper surface is bristling with little teeth, while the lower 
surface is covered with a soft felt-like down. Ending in a sharp 
point, the leaf is pinched in, a little more on one side than 
the other, about half an inch from the end. The lower 
end is rounded off and finishes in a well-defined petiole. 
