THE PIPE AND TABOR 107 



perhaps more familiar as the parent of pop-guns 

 than of musical instruments. Then again, there 

 are the hollow stalks of umbelliferous plants, such 

 as angelica and hemlock. The late Mr. Welch, 

 in his interesting book on Recorders, pointed out^ 

 that sambucus the elder, calamus the reed, and 

 cicuta the hemlock all occur in classic verse in 

 relation to rustic music. Indeed the word calamus 

 still lives, though corrupted to the French chalu- 

 meau and still further altered to the German 

 Schalmei and the English shawm. 



Welch doubts whether hemlock or similar stems 

 would be strong enough for the suggested purpose. 

 They certainly would not stand rough usage, but 

 it is possible to make a taborer's pipe out of an 

 Angelica stem, for I have one. It is husky and 

 out of tune, but it shows the thing to be possible. 



This connexion between music and the form of 

 plants is not without interest from a wider point 

 of \dew. We ask ourselves why hollow cylinders 

 occur so commonly in vegetable architecture. That 

 rough teacher, the struggle for life, has taught plants 

 that a tube is, mechanically speaking, the best way 

 of arranging a limited amount of formative or 

 building material. The hemlock or the reed can 

 thus make stalks of ample strength and at com- 

 paratively slight cost. There is romance in the 

 fact that plants made tubular stems to their own 

 private profit for unnumbered ages before the 

 coming of man : the hollow reeds waiting all these 

 aeons till Pan should come and make them musical. 



^ See p. 267. 



