ENGELMANN NOTES ON AGAVE. 29I 



Notes on Agave. 

 By George Engelmann, M.D. 



Just as the Yuccas among the Liliaceous plants, of which I 

 have treated in a former paper (vol. 3, p. 17 & 210), the Agaves 

 present among the Amaryllidaceae a peculiar, gigantic, and some- 

 times tree-like development, not otherwise found in these fami- 

 lies. Like the Yuccas, they are confined to the new world ; but, 

 unlike them, which are represented by only about a dozen spe- 

 cies, of a more or less uniform and unmistakable character, the 

 Agave type branches out in perhaps a hundred (or 1S0 or 200, 

 if we dare trust the catalogues of nurserymen) species, of greatly 

 diversified appearance. 



The botanical investigation of the Agaves meets with the same 

 difficulties as that of the genus above mentioned in connection 

 with them, the Yuccas, and as the Cacti, or, to use a term 

 more of horticultural than botanical significance, but sanctioned 

 by the authority of no less a name than that of the elder DeCan- 

 dolle, the Plantes grasses. They have, for the most part, 

 been long in cultivation, the individuals being propagated with 

 their individual peculiarities by suckers, and very rarely by 

 seeds. Many of them have never bloomed in Europe, and many 

 that did bloom have not been studied by competent botanists ; of 

 a large number, their native country is unknown, and the travel- 

 ling horticultural collectors have paid more, or only, attention to 

 marketable plants than to botanically- instructive specimens. 

 Moreover, most of these plants are so clumsy and so difficult to 

 properlv preserve for the herbarium that travellers have shunned 

 them ; so that even the standard herbaria contain mostly only 

 very scanty and incomplete material. 



In the old United States only a single representative of the ge- 

 nus was known, the Agave Virginica, a rather small and incon- 

 spicuous plant, if compared with the extensive development the 

 genus attains in Mexico and further south, in the number of 

 species as well as in the bulk of individuals. But on our south- 

 western border lands, the same region where the Cacti become a 

 leading feature of the Flora, the botanists of the U. S. and Mexi- 

 can Boundary Commission, twenty to twenty-five years ago, dis- 



