BULAWAYO, Rhodesia, the principal town and chief commercial centre of Matabeleland, South Africa, 490 miles north east of Mafeking, 1,360 miles from Cape Town, with which it is connected by railroad. It has several hotels, good business blocks and resi dences, banks and telephone service and is rapidly growing in size and importance. A few years ago it was the chief town of the Matabele tribe, though only a collection of rude huts, in an enclosure of wattles, whose inhabitants were savages of the lowest type. The royal kraal Is now replaced by the government house, which communicates by an avenue a mile and a half long with the town proper. Pop. (white) about 5,000.
BULB (Greek Boa:r6c) , meaning bulbous root, the name-given to a leaf bud belonging to certain perennial herbaceous plants, and par ticularly to the monocotyledons. It is usually underground, and is supported by a kind of solid and horizontal plate lying between it and the true root. To this flattened portion the fleshy scales of which the bulb is externally formed are fixed by their base. The interior contains the rudiments of the flower-stalks and leaves. The outermost scales are thin and dry like paper, hut they become more fleshy and succulent in the interior. Sometimes the scales
arc of one piece, a single scale embracing the whole circumference of the bulb, as in the onion and the hyacinth. They are then named "coated" or "tunicated" bulbs. At other times the scales are smaller and free at the sides, and cover one another only in the manlier of tiles on a roof, as in the white lily. Lastly, the coats are sometimes so close as to be confounded together, so that the bulb seems as if formed of a solid and homogeneous substance. Such bulbs are called "solid," and they are exem plified in the common saffron. Bulbs again are either "simple," as in the tulip or squill, or they are "multiple," or formed of several small bulbs collected under the same envelope, as in garlic. Bulbs are reproduced every year, but differently in different species, the new bulbs sometimes being formed in the centre, sometimes at the side, sometimes above, sometimes below the old bulbs. The bulb is usually found in short sea son plants, and is especially adapted for quick growth.