300 NOTES ON AGAVE. 
Yucca MacrocaRPA, Engelm., VI. 224, of this Journal, has now been found by C. G. Pringle in flower; the 
panicle is densely pubescent ; fevers about 24 to 3} inches wide with broadly oval acutish segments. Y. baccata has 
a glabrous panicle and larger flowers with narrow tapering segments. Y. Schottii, Engelm., Yuce. 46, from Arizona, 
is Swen only from Schott’s notes and very poor specimens, and has never been identified sues. Its panicle is likewise 
pubescent ; its leaves short, narrow and very thick, with few thin fibres. It may possibly be a small-leaved form of 
Y. macrocarpa, which also shows a few thin fibres on the leaves. Both are recommended to the study of observers. 
V. NOTES ON AGAVE. 
FroM THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE ACADEMY OF ScIENCE oF Sr. Louis, Vou. III. pp. 291-322; pp. 8-35 oF REPRINT 
ISSUED DECEMBER, 1875. 
Just as the Yuccas among the Liliaceous plants, of which I have treated in a former [291 (3)] 
paper (vol. IIT, pp. 17 and 210), the Agaves present among the Amaryllidacez a peculiar, 
gigantic, and sometimes tree-like development, not otherwise found in these families. Like the Yuccas, 
they are confined to the New World ; but, unlike them, which are represented by only about a dozen 
species, of a more or less uniform and unmistakable character, the Agave type branches out in per- 
haps a hundred (or 180 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 DeCandolle, 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 stud- 
ied by competent botanists ; of a large number, their native country is unknown, and the travelling 
horticultural collectors have paid more or chief attention to marketable plants than to botanically- 
instructive specimens. Moreover, most of these plants are so clumsy and so difficult to properly 
preserve for the herbarium that travellers have shunned them; so that even the standard herbaria 
mostly contain only very scanty and incomplete material. 
In the old United States only a single representative of the genus was known, the Agave Virginica, 
a rather small and inconspicuous 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 inidzvidonda, But 
on our southwestern border lands, the same region where the Cacti become a leading feature of the 
Flora, the botanists of the U. S. and Mexican Boundary Commission, twenty to twenty- 
five years ago, discovered a greater development of the genus, and Prof. Torrey in his [292 (4)] 
Botany of that Boundary (published in 1859) was able to indicate five other species ; his 
account, however, owing to an insufficiency of material, is meagre and to some extent erroneous. As 
far as I am informed, nothing has been added to our knowledge of these plants in the sixteen years 
elapsed since his publication ; but in the last few years a quantity of new material has been gathered, 
and, being placed at my disposal, has enabled me to make a more thorough study of the genus. 
The Agaves are American plants, some of which became known to Europeans since the discov~ 
ery of America, and especially since the conquest of Mexico: the great Agave Americana is said to 
have been already in cultivation in Europe as early as the year 1561; from the similarity of the 
spinous leaves they were considered forms of the Aloes of the Old World, and the name “ Aloe ” has 
in popular language stuck to them to this day. Linnzus was the first to distinguish them ; and in 
his Hortus Upsalensis (1748), p. 87, he established the genus Agave, and enumerated the characters 
by which “these American plants” are readily known from the true “ Asiatic and African Aloes.” 
