— 4 — 
covered a greater development of the genus, and Prof. Torrey in 
his 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 knowl¬ 
edge of these plants in the sixteen years elapsed since his publi¬ 
cation ; 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 discovery of America, and espe¬ 
cially 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 word, and the name 
“Aloe” has in popular language stuck to them to this day. 
Linnaeus 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 v 
readily known from the true “Asiatic and African Aloes.” He 
adds that .he has “named them Agave , because that word indi¬ 
cates something grand and admirable.” It is interesting to 
observe v how even at that early date, when botanical geography 
was not yet born, the geographical domains of these different 
groups of plants struck the discriminating mind of Linnaeus as 
something remarkable and characteristic.; 
The Agaves were first recognized as a distinct tribe by R. A. 
Salisbury,* who united in his 12th order of Sarmentacecv Yucca 
(with a “pericarpium superum”) and Agave, Polyanthes and 
others /(with a “pericarpium inferum”), thus recognizing the 
great resemblance of these plants, which we now place in differ¬ 
ent but parallel families, just on account of the relation of the 
ovary to the other parts of the flower. 
Other botanistst have appended them to the Amaryllida- 
cece, but it must be confessed that they have only the inferior:} 
f Endlicher, gen., p. 1S1; Kunth, Enum. 5, p. 81S. 
x In Agave the ovary is truly and entirely inferior,, but the closely allied Polyanthes g A* 
shows a partly (about %) superior ovary. 
23456 7 89 10 Missouri 
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