280 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



name A. lurida^ but unfortunately giving no indication as to 

 whether he meant the broad- or narrow-leaved form of that 

 composite species; and Willdenow and the younger Alton 

 have complicated lurida by citing Jacquin's illustration as 

 pertaining to it. The short urceolately beaked capsule and 

 bulbil are indicative of something very different from the 

 Agave Vera Cruz of Miller (A. lurida a Alton) as now under- 

 stood and excellently figured subsequently by Zuccarini;* 

 and although the flowers are not characteristically pictured, 

 Jacquin's herbarium, now at the Vienna Hofmuseum, con- 

 tains flowers of ''Agave lurida Hort. Schonbr,/' which I was 

 permitted by Dr. Zahlbruckncr to photograph in 1905^ that 

 clearly belong with the short capsules and differ greatly from 

 those of the broad-leaved lurida as understood by Zuccarini. 



AVhat was held for the lurida of Jacquin (but also referred 

 back to the Commelin narrow-leaved Vera Cruz aloe) flowered 

 at Florence in 1799 and again in 1909, when it was adequately 

 described and figured by Targioni Tozzetti,t also under the 

 name A. lurida^ under which it occurred in Italian gardens at 

 least as late as 18G8, when Engelmann gathered representative 

 material in the Botanical Garden at Naples. f 



The prickly Agave rigida studied by De Spin§ at San Se- 

 bastien, near Turin, in IS 12, on which rests much subse- 

 quent characterization of the Agave so-called, was clearly 

 Alton's .1. lurida 15^ and not the rigida which Ha worth differ- 

 entiated from it at about that time. 



The unfortunate omission of a varietal designation for what 

 the writers must have recognized as not its typical or ^^a'' form, 

 is, responsible for much of the subsequent confusion attend- 



g the name lurida. 

 le tvDical A. lurida 



lurida 



as 



II 



* Act. Acad. Caes. Loop. Carol. Nat. Cur. IG^; 6G9-673. pi 49-51. (1833). 



t Ann. Mils. Imp. Firenze. 2^: 25, 31-5. pi. 6. (1810). 



J It was apparently withered flowers and fruit of such a plant, from 

 Bcllagio, on which Jacobi based his otherwise unknown Agave flavovirens 

 (Versuch. 258), subsequently referred to by him as flavoviridis (Nachtrag. 

 2 : 75).— See Rept. Mo. Bdt. Gard. 18: 23G. 



§ Jard. de St. Sebastien. 23. pi. 1. 



^ Bot. Mag. 37. under pi 1522. 



