﻿LITERATURE OF FURCRAEA WITH SYNOPSIS OF SPECIES. 27 



the further citation of Willdenow's Agave vivipara was quite 

 erroneous, because the specimen in Willdenow's Herbarium, 

 which the writer has been enabled by the courtesy of the Ber- 

 lin Museum Staff to inspect, is most plainly a Furcraea. The 

 older botanists did not know that bulbils are produced by all, 

 or almost all the species of Eu-Agave and Furcraea, so that 

 every specimen which displayed this feature was referred to 

 as "vivipara" with well nigh interminable confusion as the 

 consequence. Agave vivipara of Miller's eighth edition was 

 perhaps a Furcraea; it will be considered later. What 

 "Agave vivipara" tab. 180 of the Plantes Grasses may rep- 

 resent, the writer is unable even to conjecture; it seems hardly 

 to be either a Furcraea or an Agave* Agave vivipara of 

 Wight (Ic. 2024) is an Eu-Agave, for which Col. ^ Prain 

 and the writer in a note f on the Agaveae naturalized in 

 India have proposed the name of Agave Wighiii;^ this 

 appears to be a native of the Antilles and is quite distinct 

 from the species recently in growth at Kew under the same 

 name which is Agave Cantala, Roxb. (Rumpf, Herb. Amboin. 

 V. t. 94) = A. vivipara, Baker in Gard. Chron. n. s. viii. 

 (1877), p. 780, excl. all syn. but Wight, but not in Kew Bull, 

 no. 39, March 1890, cxxxv. 



Returning now to Agave tuherosa, it is evident that Miller's 

 plant was the "Aloe americana tuberosa minor spinosa. 

 Parad: Batav: Prod:" of the Hortus Amstelodamensis ii. Cap. 

 xix. fig. 19, as indeed is expressly stated under Aloe 34 by 

 Isaac Rand, in the Index Hort. Chcls. 1739 (cited by Aiton), 

 a rare work to which the writer has had access through the 

 kindness of the authorities of the Natural History Branch of 

 the British Museum. Miller makes no allusion to the "twin- 

 spined" form of tuberosa, and an examination of both living 

 and herbarium examples has convinced the writer that this 

 feature is neither confined to any single species nor constant 

 even in the individual. In Furcraea tuherosa the leaf margin 

 is sharply indented, the rather close set prickles forming each 



* Cf. however, Todaro, Hort. Panorm. ii. pp. 51-54. tt. xxxvii-xxxvill. 

 t Govt, of India Agricultural Ledger. 1906, no. 7. (Veg. Prod. Series 

 no. 99.) 



