Note 41 — SIR MARCO POLO, THE VENETIAN, AND HIS TRAVELS IN ASIA.

The Hon. Robert Lindsay writes:—“At night each man lights a fire at his post, and furnishes himself with a dozen joints of the large bamboo, one of which he occasionally throws into the fire, and the air it contains being rarefied by the heat, it explodes with a report as loud as a musket.”—“Lives of the Lindsays,” iii. 191.