THE CENTURY PLANT 207 



THE CENTURY PLANT, AND SOME OTHER PLANTS OF 



THE DRY COUNTRY 1 



By Professor WILLIAM TRELEASE 



MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN 



TT would be interesting if we might know whether Columbus and his 

 -L fellow voyagers noticed what is oddly called 'bamboo' by the 

 present islanders, when they first saw the Bahamas in the autumn of 

 1492. The plant, a striking one even to us, must have seemed still 

 stranger to Europeans at that time, for although Meyer and others 

 have attempted to show that the century plant was known in the 

 Mediterranean country as early as the eleventh century, and claim has 

 even been made to its recognition among the mural paintings of 

 Pompeii, a thousand years earlier still, Agave represents an essentially 

 American and very distinct type of vegetation which must have been 

 novel to those travelers into a new world. At any rate — they had little 

 time for botanizing — there is no evidence that this conspicuous element 

 in the Bahamian landscape was among the strange animals and plants 

 that they paraded on their return home, and, curiously enough, it re- 

 mains to-day without a published description or tenable scientific name. 



The discoverers must have seen at least one other species of the 

 same type when, during this first voyage, they found the Greater An- 

 tilles; and the busy quarter of a century which followed, with its addi- 

 tions of the Lesser Antilles, upper South America, and a part of the 

 Gulf coast to the map of the world, undoubtedly revealed others. 



The native name e maguey,' which still persists in Porto Rico for a 

 species of the related genus Furcrcea, was mentioned in Martyr's book 

 of 1516, and seems to have sufficiently impressed itself on the minds 

 of the adventurers to assume a generic quality, for they later trans- 

 ferred it to the fleshy-leaved agaves of Mexico, which the aborigines 

 knew as ' metl,' from which it is easily inferred that they had repeatedly 

 seen and discussed and inquired about these strange fleshy-leaved plants 

 with tall candelabrum-like inflorescence. 



The most familiar of these plants in our gardens has long borne the 

 popular name of century plant. Everybody knows it — or thinks that he 

 knows it — to-day. Its rather narrow, somewhat grayish-green leaves 

 have a peculiar curvature and their ends frequently arch downwards in 

 a characteristic hooked form, while the prickles on their margins stand 



'A lecture delivered in the Field Museum Course at Chicago, on October 

 13, 1906. 



