To the description given by Mr. W. Chappell, he adds his own comment: “these reeds throw out shoots around them, and perhaps each row of shoots may have been counted as a year’s growth.” I am not so sure that a reed “pervious throughout” would throw off shoots; some such are merely sheathed like bulrushes and flags. The contention of Mr. Rowbotham that Antigenedes “must needs change the time of cutting flute reeds, in order to get crisp reeds, and reeds with small bores, and that they might give out these (_Hemiolian Chromatic_) querulous intervals” is not convincing, and the use of the word “querulous” betrays that he is “begging the question”; indeed, his point is that “the age was an age of quibbling and cavilling and hair splitting, and these subtleties of thought had their parallel or consequence in other things as well,”—including querulous flutes. This imagined correspondence between things and thoughts shews the writer to be clever as a special pleader, but that he is a specialist in wind instruments does not follow. The question is still open, did Theophrastus speak of flute reeds or of flute pipes, or of the reeds to be used for bulbs, or of those for making reed tongues? Antigenedes wrote about the year 450 B.C., it is said, that he increased the number of holes of the flute. It is a curious coincidence that Ling Lun the Chinese minister of Huang-Ti, was also sent to a _chosen spot_, called Tahsia (since identified as Bactria, the mother of cities from its unrivalled antiquity) west of the Kuenlun mountains, where there is a valley called Chichku where bamboos of regular thickness grew, that he might there choose the finest sort for music, and thus set out the true _lus_ or laws and principles. How strangely the Greeks and Chinese tales agree, that the pipes must be very choice, and of a particular growth. Some years back, when I first entertained the idea that these bulbs figuring on the vases represented real hollow bulbs, I sought high and low for evidence of any species of reed growing with such distinct shape that it could be so employed. I made enquires of curators at South Kensington botanical departments, and also at Kew, but without success, and no botanist could afford me the information that I was anxious for. There was no reed, neither roots of reeds, anywhere answering the description. Yet such reeds grew! It is because the nature of the growth of the reed has assumed a most interesting importance at the present stage of our investigations, that I have introduced these quotations from the ancient writers.