eir aspect, though not their
extent, may be called the Savannahs of Ceylon. Here peaches, cherries,
and other European fruit trees, grow freely; but they become evergreens
in this summer climate, and, exhausted by perennial excitement, and
deprived of their winter repose, they refuse to ripen their fruit.[3] A
similar failure was discovered in some European vines, which were
cultivated at Jaffna; but Mr. Dyke, the government agent, in whose
garden they grew, conceiving that the activity of the plants might be
equally checked by exposing them to an extreme of warmth, as by
subjecting them to cold, tried, with perfect success, the experiment of
laying bare the roots in the strongest heat of the sun. The result
verified his conjecture. The circulation of the sap was arrested, the
vines obtained the needful repose, and the grapes, which before had
fallen almost unformed from the tree, are now brought to thorough
maturity, though inferior in flavour to those produced at home.[4]

[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 Kandang, 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 succe