REVISION OF THE AGAVES OF THE GROUP APPLANATAE. 
BY WILLIAM TRELEASE. 
Though its relationship to the other species here brought 
together is less close than that which they bear to one an- 
other, a circumstance probably connected with its geographic 
isolation and their own occurrence over a relatively small 
area, Agave applanata may be taken as the initial of a group 
of hard-leaved agaves best known in European gardens by, 
this species, and to American botanists by A. Parryi. When 
immature, applanata resembles some of the other species so 
closely that they have been taken to be varieties of it, but 
this resemblance grows less as the adult stage is reached, so 
that at maturity it differs markedly from them in aspect, as 
it does always in details. 
Of the ten species of this group, applanata is at home on 
the lava-beds above Jalapa, Wislizeni and parrasana are 
found in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon, Patonii occurs in middle 
Durango and chihuahuana in middle Chihuahua. The other 
five species are confined to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, 
and the adjacent parts of Mexico. Neither is known to range 
far, the most remote localities in which a single species has 
been collected being southern Coahuila, where the type of 
Wislizent was found, and northern Nuevo Leon where what 
appears to be the same species occurs. 
The Applanatae are not very closely allied to any other 
group of Euagave; but on the one hand they are evidently 
related to the continental groups typically represented by 
A. americana and A. atrovirens, and on the other they ap- 
pear to have given origin to the Umbelliflorae of Lower Cal- 
ifornia. . 
‘APPLANATAE. 
Usually rather small cespitose acaulescent plants with 
rather numerous hard fleshy nearly or quite smooth gray or 
white usually short and broad stiff and straight leaves with 
rather stout straight or somewhat flexuous openly grooved 
or flattened decurrent spine and rather large subdistant 
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