﻿LITERATURE OF FURCRAEA WITH SYNOPSIS OF SPECIES. 31 



the writer cannot doubt, F. geminispina, Jacobi, = F. iuhe- 

 rosa, Aiton. 



Jacobi's type has doubtless meantime perished, but there 

 is a plant now at Kew which answers unmistakably to the de- 

 scription of ''geminispina," and this appears to the writer to 

 be identical with a specimen in the Herbarium collected for 

 the brothers Smith in the Island of Bequia (one of the Gren- 

 adines) south of St. Vincent. Both no doubt are the same 

 as a Furcraea sent in 1892 by Mr. C. A. Barber from Antigua 

 with an illustrative set of photographs, a brief description of 

 the plant, and a drawing of the flower, which is at once dis- 

 tinguishable from its allies by the proportionately longer 

 gcrmcn, a feature which is obvious in the Goodenough Her- 

 barium type of Furcraea tuberosa. There are examples in 

 the Kew Herbarium from Nevis and Grenada also. 



The earliest mention of the Agaveae by any European 

 writer occurs in a work published at Basle in 1533, where the 

 " Maguey " of San Domingo is Ukenedto a palm*, and the name 

 is said to have signified, in the Haitian tongue, a drum or cym- 

 bal. Martius believed that the Haitian drums were made 

 from sections of the scape of the Maguey, but however this 

 may be there is every reapon to suppose that the original 

 Maguey was not any Agave at all but the Furcraea which our 

 present information shows to be common, if not dominant, 

 in several of the Leeward Islands group, and was brought to 

 Berlin, as Jacobi states, from S. Domingo, his geminispina 

 namely, i. e., F. tuberosa, Aiton. None of the West Indian 

 Agaves has a trunk except A. Wightii, which appears to have 

 a different distribution, and in any case that has not the char- 

 acteristic "palm-like" habit of Furcraea tuberosa. 



It has been stated (Dr. K. Braun in "Pfianzer" no. 

 14, Sept. 29, 1900) that the earliest account of any Agave 

 is that given by Oviedo, "Commandeur von St. Domingo," 

 in the Hist. Gen. de las Ind. (Seville 1535) in which it is men- 

 tioned that the people of Araya are called Maguey es from the 

 abundance of the Maguey plant in their country. Von Mar- 



* Decades, Cologne, ed. 1574, p. 301, quoted by Martius. 



