Of the many materials from which man, in his ingenuity, has fashioned musical instruments, none is more widely used or of greater significance than bamboo; it plays a large role in the cultures of most of the areas where it grows, for it is used as a food as well as a material for all sorts of construction and artisanship. Moreover, it presents unusual possibilities to the investigator because its physical characteristics are so pronounced and so difficult to alter significantly that its influence on the form and shape of man-made objects is easily traced. Wood, or metal, or clay are easily shaped; they present but little resistance to the craftsman, but bamboo is very nearly immutable. This very quality--its resistance to change--represents both the strength and the weakness of bamboo, for its physical characteristics allow many instruments to be constructed from it with little effort, while for many others it is almost entirely useless. Bamboo is so well adapted to musical purposes that one might almost say that it is only necessary to cut a piece to produce a musical instrument. We might expect, therefore, that the portions of the earth where bamboo grows would possess certain organological features in common with one another; we shall try to show that this, in fact, is the case. Our belief is that many of the peculiarities of the shape of instruments of the present day may be traced to either a material, such as bamboo, or gourd, or horn, or to forgotten technological processes, or symbolic associations. A well known example, of course, is the horn, which in its name, its shape, and its association with the chase, indicates its relationship with the animal horn from which it stemmed. Bamboo is a grass, and like most members of its family, it is extremely hardy and of exceedingly wide distribution. The areas where it grows include South America and the southern portions of North America, eastern Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. It grows especially abundantly in Malaysia and Indonesia, and is hardy in the northernmost reaches of Japan and to a height of 10,000 feet in the Himalayas. The plant is not to be found in Europe, western Asia, or Siberia, and with the significant exception of Madagascar is not of wide occurrence in Africa or its environs, though it does grow there to a degree, especially in the southern areas. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of bamboo in these areas; its use as a food, for building, for utensils, as a material for artistic endeavor, and for water pipes, to mention only a few of its practical applications, place it in the very forefront of cultural importance. In China, in fact, bamboo possesses an importance transcending that of the merely physical; it is intimately connected with many of the less tangible aspects of culture: law, measurement, gambling, and music. (Moore, 1960, 96) The physical characteristics of bamboo are too well known to be described here, and instruments that are made of, or inspired by, bamboo conform closely to these qualities in that they are usually straight, rather narrow, and cylindrical or semi-cylindrical. Though there are one or two exceptions to the rule that bamboo instruments are straight--notably the Japanese flute, the shaku-hachi (Malm, 1959, 158)--for the most part this rule holds, and it is of some importance, for several other grasses and reeds also possess the qualities of being straight and tubular; they, however, are often easily susceptible to being bent, and this distinction between bamboo, which can only be curved by a skilled and patient craftsman, and other materials, is an important and highly significant one. In the areas that do not have bamboo, notably western Asia, the northerly