cylinders found among plants, for instance, the
reed grass that grows in fens and dykes, or the elder which supplies a
pipe when its pith is bored out, and is perhaps more familiar as the
parent of pop-guns than of musical instruments. Then again, there are
the hollow stalks of umbelliferous plants, such as angelica and hemlock.
The late Mr. Welch, in his interesting book on Recorders, pointed out
{107} that _sambucus_ the elder, _calamus_ the reed, and _cicuta_ the
hemlock all occur in classic verse in relation to rustic music. Indeed
the word calamus still lives, though corrupted to the French chalumeau
and still further altered to the German Schalmei and the English shawm.

Welch doubts whether hemlock or similar stems would be strong enough for
the suggested purpose. They certainly would not stand rough usage, but
it is possible to make a taborer's pipe out of an _Angelica_ stem, for I
have one. It is husky and out of tune, but it shows the thing to be
possible.

This connexion between music and the form of plants is not without
interest from a wider point of view. We ask ourselves why hollow
cylinders occur so commonly in vegetable architecture. That rough
teacher, the struggle for life, has taught plants that a tube is,
mechanically speaking, the best way of arranging a limited amount of
formative or building material. The hemlock or the reed can thus make
stalks of ample strength and at comparatively slight cost. There is
romance in the fact that plants made tubular stems to their own private
profit for unnumbered ages before the coming of man: the hollow reeds
waiting all these aeons till Pan should come and make them musical.

The pipe and tabor have probably come down to us less changed than any
other wood-wind instrument, with the possible exception of the panpipes;
both flutes and flageolets have become covered with keys, while the pipe
still has no more than three aboriginal holes, one for the thumb behind
and two for the fingers in front. I have wasted some time in trying to
make out how the early taborers held their pipes, but musical instruments
are generally drawn with hopeless inaccuracy. I have been rewarded by
finding that a boy in Luca della Robbia's bas-relief (Fig. 5) at Florence
holds the pipe just as I do, {108a} between the ring and little fingers,
which keep the instrument steady even when all three holes are uncovered.
There is an interesting point connected with the true or French