2o8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



on marked fleshy hummocks, and the short stout end spine is not con- 

 tinued down the border as it is in some species. Perhaps even com- 

 moner than the typical form are one with bright yellow stripes down the 

 sides of the leaves, and another with rather faint yellow lines distrib- 

 uted over the surface; and a still finer but much less common variety 

 has a broad stripe of yellow down the center of the leaf. Among 

 the cultivated variegated century plants one yellow-margined form, with 

 the green parts of a darker shade and the end spine long and slender, 

 has been distinguished for half a century under the name A. picta; but, 

 as with the variegated forms of A. Americana, nothing is known as to 

 its source or the first date of its appearance. Like the unvariegated 

 form, these yellow-margined plants are now becoming established along 

 the Italian Riviera. 



When the American aloe, as it has often been called, was a novelty 

 in Europe, its flowering was one of the wonders of the world. Not only 

 did its size and form and the great age reached by some plants before 

 flowering excite interest, but odd rumors seem to have gone abroad con- 

 cerning its behavior. One of these gives indirect evidence of the long 

 persistence of a colloquial expression familiar to most of us to-day, for 

 Philip Miller, nearly two hundred years ago, gravely assured the British 

 public that the flowers of this plant do not really open with a report 

 like that of firing a gun, the then prevalent impression that they do so 

 probably coming from a misinterpretation of somebody's statement that 

 the flowering of a century plant ' made a great noise/ The phenomenon 

 has now become so common as to attract no attention about the Mediter- 

 ranean region, on the Channel Islands, and in the warmer parts of our 

 own country, where the plants grow out of doors and flower when they 

 are ten or fifteen years old; but it is still a matter of much interest in 

 the colder countries where they require the protection of glass houses 

 and develop slowly enough to suggest, if not quite to justify, their 

 popular name. 



The century plant shares with or even surpasses the true bamboo in 

 its reputation of offering most of the necessities of human life. Food, 

 drink, clothing, building material, forage, military barricades, razor- 

 strops with soap and brush, medicine, pins, needles, paper, glue and 

 a red coloring matter are said to be afforded by it. 



It is true that most of the indicated uses may be made of it, but 

 as a matter of fact the real century plant is very little used except for 

 ornament or as a hedge plant, though its leaf fiber is firm, fine and 

 white and used to a limited extent for the better class of cordage or 

 for a stiff thread peculiarly adapted to some of the ornamental lace- 

 work of the Azores and Mediterranean countries. Nearly all its reputed 

 uses actually refer to different if sometimes superficially similar plants 

 which have been mistaken for it, and the literature of e Agave Ameri- 

 cana ' is chaotic enough to tax the patience of even a botanist. 



