xlii 
MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES &C, 
present, a large demand for the English market. The probability of this 
identity rests principally on a communication from Major Hannay, who 
intimates that the Bhcea (Kunchoora) of Upper Assam has been recog¬ 
nized by an intelligent Chinese gentleman, and corroborated by others 
of his countrymen, who were formerly employed at the Government tea 
manufactory, to be the Bengchung Hapo, or grass-cloth plant of China. 
Major Hannay has himself long been aware that the Shan hemp and the 
Bheea are the produce of the same plant. The question is alike interest¬ 
ing and important. Should the additional enquiries the Society is now 
instituting tend to remove all doubt of the identity of the Rungpore and 
Assam nettle with the China plant, the attention of those who are now 
engaged in the introduction into England of the material from which the 
grass-cloth is made might be advantageously turned to the Indian product, 
in order to ascertain if it can be grown and prepared ala less cost. If 
it, however, prove to be a different plant, the information thus brought to 
public notice may induce those interested in such matters to ascertain 
whether this fibre cannot be turned to a more profitable account than for 
fishing nets and towing lines, the only purposes for which, it would appear, 
it is atpresent employed.” 
is called Pan.— Transactions, vol. 3, page II.) The l ate Landers, 
a traveller in the same country, refers also to this hemp, and adds, that 
though the Shans have various fibres they invariably prefer this description. 
—(Journal, vol. 2, page 253.) Major Jenkins has frequently sent speci¬ 
mens of it from Assam, and he also met with it in Cachar. That from the 
latter country be describes as “more like good hempen twine than that 
made from any plant in India, and from one small sample I saw well 
bleached, it would, 1 imagine, make a very neat canvas.”—(Trans, vol. 
2, page 171.) Major Macfarquhar raised it very readily at Tavoy, on 
the Tenasserim coast, from a few shoots sent to him in 1836 by Col. 
Burney from Ava. “It is cultivated,” he remarks, “by the Shans, Siam¬ 
ese, and the Chinese ; the two latter, with whom I have spoken on the 
subject, are loud in its praise for its fineness of taxture and durability, 
both as cloth and cordage.”—(Trans, vol. 5, page 19.) Mr. Fortune 
makes no mention of the grass-cloth in his recently published work, 
“Three years wanderings in China j” he merely observes, that “there is 
a species of Urtica, both wild and cultivated, which grows about 3 or 4 
feet high, and produces a strong fibre in the bark, which is prepared by 
the natives, and sold for the purpose of making ropes and cables.” It is 
not, however, improbable that the plant here refered to is the one, for it 
is well known that the plant which yields so fine a fibre as that from 
which grass-cloth is made, also affords a substance sufficiently strong 
for manufacturing into the largest cables. Moreover, this allusion to a 
fibre prepared from a species of the nettle tribe is interesting, inas¬ 
much as it assists to strengthen the opinion—which has been doubted 
by more than one writer on the subject—that this grass-do 111 fibre is 
produced from one of the Urticcw. 
