306 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
It grows in large tufts, and vast tracts are covered with it between 
Khyrpur and the river.” This kana ( Typha elephantina, Roxb.) could 
certainly not have been the plant from which canoes were made, as has 
been suggested by some of the critics. 
For purposes of mere flotation it is used by fishermen and others 
when dried and tied in bundles, but the suggestion that the boats 
capable of holding several persons, mentioned by Herodotus, were made 
of it, is obviously absurd. 
4. Tue Inpran ReEep (KaXapos “Ivdckés). 
Borassus flabelliformis, Linn.—The Palmyra Palm. 
It appears to have been calmly accepted by commentators that ‘‘ the 
Indian reed,” referred to by Grecian and Latin authors, was the same as 
the plant to which we give the name bamboo. So far as I have read 
their writings, excepting the alternatives mentioned below, I have not 
met with any suggestion that this identification is incorrect.* To 
show in the first place that it is so, and secondly to name a plant which 
fulfils the required conditions, is however not difficult. 
The facts that the bamboo does not attain more than about one- 
third of the size of the so-called reed ; that it could not, therefore, have 
been used for the purposes for which the Indian reed is said to have 
been employed, and the absence of the larger kinds of bamboo from the 
region of the lower Indus valley, all combine to prove that the above 
identification of the commentators must be rejected. 
The more important among the numerous references to the Indian 
reed are the following :—Herodotus™ speaks of the imhabitants of the 
marshes, which are formed by the flooding of rivers in India, as fishing 
from canoes formed of canes, which are cut from node to node, each 
segment forming a boat. Pliny® gives a similar account, and says 
that these boats traverse the Accesines (7. e. Chenab river). So also 
Diodorus Siculus,** who has written to the following effect :—‘‘ In 
India the lands bordering rivers and marshes yield reeds of prodigious 
size. It is all that a man can do to embrace one. Canoes are made 
from them.” 
Ktesias’s account, as given by Photios,* is that the Indian reed grows 
along the course of the Indus, and that it is ‘‘so thick that two men 
could scarcely encompass its stem with their arms, and of a height 
equal to that of a mast of a merchant ship of the heaviest burden. 
Some are of a greater size even than this, though some are of less, as 
might be expected, since the mountain it grows on is of vast range. 
88 Sprengel includes the rattan, Calamus rotang, in his identification. This is, if 
possible, a plant still more unsuited to the requirements of the case. 
84 Thalie, book u1., xevill. 
85 Hist. Nat., lib. vit., cap. ii., tom. i, p. 372, line 22; and lib. xvi., cap. xxxvil. 
tom. i1., p. 27, line 32. 
86 Bibl., lib. m., § xvil., p. 182. 
87 Cf. Ancient India, by J. W. M‘Crindle, p. 10. 
