﻿LITERATURE OF FUKCRAEA WITH SYNOPSIS OF SPECIES. 37 



gigantea; a specimen of his gathering at the British Museum 

 marked "vulgo Cabuya, Panama" is, the writer thinks, true 

 gigantea, — in any case it certainly is not iuberosa; this is prob- 

 ably the same as no. 973 of p. 21G, Botany Voy. of the Herald, 

 "on the slopes of the volcano of Chiriqui, Vcraguas, but also 

 cultivated to a considerable extent on account of its fibre . . ." 



F. gigantea is recorded from several of the small islands 

 fringing the gulfs of Panama, of Darien, and of Maracaybo, 

 from the Magdalena littoral and the delta of the Orinoco; 

 but for Trinidad the writer has little information, while To- 

 bago has a Furcraea literature of its own, as follows. 



In 1G48 Jan de Laet edited a work of Willcm Piso on Bra- 

 zilian Medicine and in this (De Medic. Lib. iv. p. 112 et fig. 

 ad. rcct. lat. p. Ill) is described a Brazilian Caraguata dis- 

 tinguished as ''Caraguata magna" or "Caraguata gua9u" 

 [i. e. "Karuata assu" or giant Karwata]. From the de- 

 scription this was manifestly a Furcraea, but in the woodcut 

 the flowers are erroneously drawn with but five segments, 

 and later authors who relied on this to fill out their matter 

 have described the "corolla" as five-petalled accordingly. 

 This work of Piso's is prefixed to the posthumous Historia 

 Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae of Georg Marcgraf of Liepstad* 

 in which (Lib. ii. pp. 87-88) the following kinds of Cara- 

 guata are distinguished (besides the true Aloe which had 

 been discussed in a former chapter), viz. (1) Caraguata grow- 

 ing on tree trunks, etc., probably a Bromelia or Karatas; (2) 

 Caraguata-gua9U, also a Bromeliad, possibly an Aechmea; (3) 

 Caraguata ayanga, the Penguin {Bromelia Pinguin, Linn.); 

 but to this De Laet appended an account borrowed from 

 Ximenes' edition of Hernandez' four books on the medicinal 

 products of New Spain (1G15) of sundry kinds of "Metl," and 

 also a rude figure taken from a sketch, provided by a friend 

 who had lived in Tobago, of a plant which De Laet supposed 

 to be the same as the "Nequametl" of the Spanish author. 

 From the woodcut in Hernandez (Ed. Nardo Recchi, "Nov. 



♦Near Dresden in Saxony: he called himself "Misnicus" i.e., of 

 Meissen. 



