[Footnote 1: In the Malayan peninsula the bamboo has been converted into an instrument of natural music, by perforating it with holes through which the wind is permitted to sigh; and the effect is described as perfectly charming. Mr. Logan, who in 1847 visited Naning; contiguous to the frontier of the European settlement of Malacca, on approaching the village of Kándáng, was surprised by hearing "the most melodious sounds, some soft and liquid like the notes of a flute, and others deep and full like the tones of an organ. They were sometimes low, interrupted, or even single, and presently they would swell into a grand burst of mingled melody. On drawing near to a clump of trees; above the branches of which waved a slender bamboo about forty feet in length, he found that the musical tones issued from it, and were caused by the breeze passing through perforations in the stem; the instrument thus formed is called by the natives the _bulu perindu_, or plaintive bamboo." Those which Mr. Logan saw had a slit in each joint, so that each stem possessed fourteen or twenty notes.]
[Footnote 3: The apple-tree in the Peradenia Gardens seems not only to have become an evergreen but to have changed its character in another particular; for it is found to send out numerous runners under ground, which continually rise into small stems and form a growth of shrub-like plants around the parent tree.]
[Footnote 4: An equally successful experiment, to give the vine an artificial winter by baring the roots, is recorded by Mr. BALLARD, of Bombay, in the _Transactions of the Agric. and Hortic. Society of India_, under date 24th May,1824. Calcutta. 1850. Vol. i. p. 96.]
The tea plant has been raised with complete success in the hills on the estate of the Messrs. Worms, at Rothschild, in Pusilawa[1]; but the want of any skilful manipulators to collect and prepare the leaves, renders it hopeless to attempt any experiment on a large scale, until assistance can be secured from China, to conduct the preparation.
[Footnote 1: The cultivation of tea was attempted by the Dutch, but without success.]
Still ascending, at an elevation of 6500 feet, as we approach the mountain plateau of Neuera-ellia, the dimensions of the trees again diminish, the stems and branches are covered with orchideæ and mosses, and around them spring up herbaceous plants and balsams, with here and there broad expanses covered with _Acanthaceæ_, whose seeds are the favourite food of the jungle fowl, which are always in perfection during the ripening of the Nilloo.[1] It is in these regions that the tree-ferns (_Alsophila gigantea_) rise from the damp hollows, and carry their gracefully plumed heads sometimes to the height of twenty feet.