Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and: Topographical with Notices of Its Natural History, Antiquities and; Productions, Volume 1Tennent, James Emerson, Sir
History
Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and: Topographical with Notices of Its Natural History, Antiquities and; Productions, Volume 1
Tennent, James Emerson, Sir
Natural history -- Sri Lanka; Sri Lanka
[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 2: See _ante_, p. 24.]
[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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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