[ 33 ] 



great part of his earlier life in the Mexican possessions, and 

 was manifestly a close and intelligent observer. 



The Thesaurus (Cap. XII) gives about twenty different sorts of Metl 

 with woodcuts of nine which, though rough, are usually good, but in the case 

 of " Maguei " the inflorescence seems to have been added wrongly, as the 

 flower is not that of an Amaryllidea at all or indeed attributable to any 

 allied order. This is repeated by Morison (Plant. Hist. Oxon. ed. 1680 p. 417 

 and t. 22 Sect. 4), for his "Aloe (3) americana flore luteo." His letterpress 

 is largely taken, as regards the " American Aloes/' from Hernandez. 



The earliest mention of the Maguei that we have been 

 able to trace is attributed to Peter Martyr (De Rebus Oc. et Or be 

 Novo, Basel, 1533) as quoted by Martius, I.e., p. 192 and by 

 Daniel! i, Nuovo Qiorn. Bot. Vol. XVII, Fasc. II, April 1885. 

 Peter Martyr seems to have known the plants, which were 

 produced in San Domingo ; he compares them to palms, and 

 says that the inner leaves were eaten by the natives. He 

 further states that the name in the Haitian language signified 

 a drum (or cymbal ?) . In the older books it is noted that a kind 

 of parchment or paper was made from the leaves of Agave, so 

 it is possible that Peter Martyr was mistaken, and that the 

 tambourines of the Haitians were called after the Agave and 

 not, as the quotation suggests, the plant from the instrument.* 



Ouiedo (v. Mart/us, also Danielli, 11. co.) in the 16th century 

 mentions at least three kinds of fibre-yielding plants of the 

 West Indies, viz. : 



(1) Henequen, (2) la Cabuja, (3) Maguey. 

 Martius (Beitrag mr Natur-und Liter atur-geschichte der 

 Ayaveen) has gone fully into Ouiedo's account and regards four 

 species as indicated ; he concludes that the Maguey Agave was 

 not " A. americana " (of Humboldt and others) but a species 

 of the Islands which he specifies as "Agave vivipara" He 

 quotes a passage in which Ouiedo refers to the Maguey of 

 the Mainland, and this seems to support the conclusion that 

 the species of the Islands from which soap and fibre are obtained 

 differed from the Maguey of Mexico. 



From 1568 to 1572 an Englishman named John Ghitton 

 travelled over nearly the whole of Central America and in his 



* Zamlarone, one of the names of Agave on the Adriaticl ittoral, which is 

 usually regarded as a corruption of the Saracenic term already mentioned, looks 

 more as if it might be derived from the oriental name of the Kettledrum or 

 Turkish cymbals (Zambur). The Apaches (Northern Mexico) use the central 

 shoot of a species of Agave for making fiddlea [Miss. Gard. Kep. VII p. 68]. 



