ON THE ECONOMIC USE'S OE BAMBOOS. 209 



above all the trees of the field in its own country is the Burmese 

 Bamboo {Dendrocalamus giganteus). It is worth the trouble of 

 a voyage to Ceylon to see the beauty of the Peradeniya Gardens, 

 near Kandy. But in that Paradise, where all the treasures and 

 wonders of the tropical flower-world are gathered together in 

 wildest wealth of colour and form, nothing is more striking than 

 this huge Bamboo. Picture to yourself great clumps of a 

 hundred or more canes, from 20 to 30 inches round and 135 feet 

 high, spurning the earth in their heavenward flight, and bending 

 their graceful heads on all sides, like great showers of sky-rockets 

 hurtled into mid-air ! Such figures as these sound like drawing the 

 long bow, yet are they sober truths, grounded upon official measure- 

 ments given me by the Director of the Gardens. Here, by way 

 of proof, is a piece of one of these culms, by no means chosen as 

 one of the greatest, but taken at haphazard, 27 inches round, 

 which, from its size and structure, will at once suggest some of 

 the many necessities to which the ingenuity of man may apply 

 such a plant. At the same time I must point out to you that, 

 looked at from the point of view of usefulness, this Burmese giant, 

 beautiful as it is, takes no very high place amongst its kin. It 

 is, as you can see, very hollow, the walls being a mere shell in 

 proportion to the height and girth of the culm — the fibre of the 

 wood is loose and spongy, it dries quickly and is then apt to 

 splinter, but when used as a water-pipe and so kept moist it lasts 

 well. The specimen now before you has been soaked in linseed 

 oil in order to preserve it ; the quartermaster on board ship who 

 did this for me, told me that it sucked up the oil almost as fast 

 as he could pour it in. He was quite amazed at the amount of 

 oil which it drank in. I must say that I was rather astonished 

 during a visit which I paid to Ceylon last winter to find that the 

 only Bamboos which have been planted there to any great extent 

 are this Dendrocalamus giganteus and the very inferior native 

 Una (Bambusa vulgaris), which is even more shelly and more 

 easily split. Here you see a fair specimen of its quality. A 

 child might almost crush it in its little hand. And yet the value 

 of the tribe is fully recognised. Seeing that on almost all the 

 tea estates which I visited Bamboos were growing, I asked the 

 Chairman of the Ceylon Planters' Association whether they 

 were cultivated for use or for ornament. His answer was to the 

 point : " For use. I had not the least idea of the many uses of 



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