Chapter BALOON to BAMBOO of B by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

pliant and supple for vse.”—De Monfart, 33.

1621.—“These Forts will better appeare by the Draught thereof, herewith sent to your Worships, inclosed in a Bamboo.”—Letter in Purchas, i. 699.

1623.—“Among the other trees there was an immense quantity of bambù, or very large Indian canes, and all clothed and covered with pretty green foliage that went creeping up them.”—P. della Valle, ii. 640; [Hak. Soc. ii. 220].

c. 1666.—“Cette machine est suspendue à une longue barre que l’on appelle Pambou.” —Thevenot, v. 162. (This spelling recurs throughout a chapter describing palankins, though elsewhere the traveller writes bambou.)

1673.—“A Bambo, which is a long hollow cane.”—Fryer, 34.

1727.—“The City (Ava) tho’ great and populous, is only built of Bambou canes.”—A. Hamilton, ii. 47.

1855.—“When I speak of bamboo huts, I mean to say that post and walls, wall-plates and rafters, floor and thatch and the withes that bind them, are all of bamboo. In fact it might almost be said that among the Indo-Chinese nations the staff of life is a Bamboo. Scaffolding and ladders, landing-jetties, fishing apparatus, irrigation-wheels and scoops, oars, masts and yards, spears and arrows, hats and helmets, bow, bow-string and quiver, oil-cans, water-stoups and cooking-pots, pipe-sticks, conduits, clothes-boxes, pan - boxes, dinner - trays, pickles, preserves, and melodious musical instruments, torches, footballs, cordage, bellows, mats, paper, these are but a few of the articles that are made from the bamboo.”—Yule, Mission to Ava, p. 153. To these may be added, from a cursory inspection of a collection in one of the museums at Kew, combs, mugs, sun-blinds, cages, grotesque carvings, brushes, fans, shirts, sails, teapots, pipes and harps.

Bamboos are sometimes popularly distinguished (after a native idiom) as male and female; the latter embracing all the common species with hollow stems, the former title being applied to a certain kind (in fact, a sp. of a distinct genus, Dendrocalamus strictus), which has a solid or nearly solid core, and is much used for bludgeons (see LATTEE) and spear-shafts. It is remarkable that this popular distinction by sex was known to Ctesias (c. B.C. 400) who says that the Indian reeds were divided into male and female, the male having no ÎntÎrwnhn.

One of the present writers has seen (and partaken of) rice cooked in a joint of bamboo, among the Khyens, a hill-people of Arakan. And Mr Markham mentions the same practice as prevalent among the Chunchos and savage aborigines on the eastern slopes of the Andes (J. R. Geog. Soc. xxv. 155). An endeavour was made in Pegu in 1855 to procure the largest obtainable bamboo. It was a little over 10 inches in diameter. But Clusius states that he had seen two great specimens in the University at Leyden, 30 feet long and from 14 to 16 inches in diameter. And E. Haeckel, in his Visit to Ceylon (1882), speaks of bamboo-stems at Peridenia, “each from a foot to two feet thick.” We can obtain no corroboration of anything approaching 2 feet.—[See Gray’s note on Pyrard, Hak. Soc. i. 330.]