If, after providing himself with these and similar necessaries, our shipwrecked man found leisure to amuse himself, he might make æolian flutes, such as Sir Emerson Tennant saw in Malacca, by boring holes in the stems of living bamboos, or he might construct a harp like that in the Kew Museum, London, which was brought from Timor by Mr. Wallace. This harp is made from a cylinder of bamboo having a node at each end. Under a strip of the outer rind a quarter of an inch wide, a sharp knife is passed so that the strip is detached from the cylinder except at its two ends. The strip forms one of the harp strings. Two small wedges are pushed under it, and the portion between the wedges can be sounded like the string of a guitar. It is also possible, and not very difficult, to make such diverse articles as paper, pens, waterproof clothing, hats, wax, pickles, bird-whistles, rafts, pillows, fermented drink, and bridges from the same versatile vegetable. In the Kew Museum, which should be visited by every one who wishes to see the varied uses to which bamboos can be applied, perhaps the most curious article is a headman’s knife brought by Mr. Franks from the southeastern peninsula of New Guinea. This singular implement, which is shaped like a cheese-scoop and seems very ill-adapted to its purpose, is marked with numerous notches, each notch representing one of its victims; and it is accompanied by an artistic apparatus, also of bamboo, intended apparently to enable the executioner to carry the severed head. The bamboo usually grows in a cluster of from ten to a hundred stalks, and springing from the same rhizome or root-stock. The rhizome is not the root, but an underground portion of the stem. It consists of a number of segments about the size and shape of a banana and somewhat bloated in the middle. The banana-like segments are joined together irregularly by their tips, so that the whole rhizome forms a strong underground trellis-work admirably adapted to support the light and yet rigid stems that rise up from it. From the under side of the rhizome spring downward the true root-fibres, numerous as the bristles of a broom. The stem itself, as every one knows, is smooth, polished, and cylindrical, and is divided into air-tight compartments by knots or nodes, which are the points at which the fibres of the stem cross over from one side to the other. The lowest ten nodes or so are usually bare, but from the upper nodes issue branches. These are very slender as compared with the main stem, and carry the foliage leaves. In most species the leaves are rather small, but in some they are very large. The species named Planotia nobilis by General Munro, a native of New Granada, has the largest leaves of any kind of grass; they are often a foot in diameter and fifteen feet in length.