Ktêsias, the Knidian, who wrote a treatise on India about four hundred years before Christ, speaks of reeds growing there, of “a height to equal the mast of a merchant ship of the heaviest burden”. This is believed to be the earliest European reference to the tribe of the Gramineae called Bambuseae, or bamboos. It seems to have been long before any exact knowledge of these “reeds” penetrated to the West, for there is little notice of them by European writers, between Pliny and the sixteenth-century herbalists, who make some slight allusion to them; Jerome Bock in 1552, for instance, mentions reeds which “in India…in arboream magnitudinem excrescunt”. The origin of the name bamboo is obscure. It may possibly be a trade corruption of the Malay word ‘Samámbu’, used for the Malacca-cane. Though the bamboo meant nothing to Western civilisation in early days, its extreme importance to the peoples of tropical countries is reflected in the position which it occupies in their folk-lore. It is said, for instance, that the Kings of Boeton—a small island near Celebes—claimed that they sprang originally from a giant bamboo. The story ran that in old days, when the people of Boeton had no king, a man entered the forest to fell bamboos for his own use. He was just attacking a fine stem, when a voice cried, “Man! do not destroy my foot, but insert your axe a little higher; I am in bondage here”.