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MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



A. antillarum, Descourtilz, if not actually that species, but 

 this title also has been sometimes transferred to a Furcraca. 

 "Istle" would take up a treatise almost by itself, but Fur- 

 craea seems, as a rule, to have escaped its visitations. In 

 Jamaica "Silk-grass" (see Long, p. 814) meant,— or at all 

 events included,— a true Aloe introduced through the Ber- 

 mudas, as it was supposed, from Africa; in the Eastern An- 

 tilles it seems to denote Furcraca tuherosa. 



In a Supplement to the Leeward Islands Gazette of the 20th 

 July, 1893, Mr. C. A. Barber, F.L.S., reported on the "Silk- 

 grass," "Silk-Dagger," or "Sweet Dagger" of which he had 

 sent dried specimens in 1892 to Kew from Antigua (identified 

 by the writer, as above explained, with F. tuherosa, Ait. fil.), 

 and in this report the plant is noted as occurring also in St. 

 Kitts, Montserrat, Nevis, and Dominica, but in the last, 

 doubtfully indigenous; Mr. Barber had heard of it in Tortola 

 (\'irgin Islands), and thought that it probably extended to 

 Barbuda also. These Antigua specimens were referred at 

 Kew to Furcraea gigantea, Vent. var. Willemetiana (Rocmer 

 Syn. iv. p. 293) which is nothing but a book equivalent for 

 the Funium pitiferum of Willemet ("Herbarium Mauriti- 

 anum" in Usteri, Annalen xviii. 179G), naturalized for the 

 sake of its fiber in the Isle de France, and from the description 

 should be F. gigantea, Vent. Roemcr gives San Domingo as 

 a chief habitat of his "gigantea" (type), so that he has evi- 

 dently just inverted the geography, for the true gigantea is 

 the mainland, not the island form. This was partly due, no 

 doubt, to Ventenat's description which in part applies more 

 precisely to tuherosa than to Commelyn's no. 18, but the rest 

 of the account indicates the Curacao species of the Dutch 

 authors unequivocally. Very likely writers on the "Aloes 

 vert" of the Mascarene Islands have at times confounded 

 different introduced Agaveae; and F. tuherosa may have 

 found its way to the Mauritius even in the time of Aublet, 

 whose West Indian names belong primarily, so far as the 

 writer knows, to tuherosa. 



In 1891 Mr. Bovell sent to Kew from Barbados two sets of 

 dried specimens of what seems to be a single species of Fur- 



