Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/811

Rh congeners of the lily family. Both, moreover, are highly specialized representatives of their respective alliances, and of the two the agaves represent the higher character of development. Thus augmented interest is joined to all three when an outline of their position in the vegetable kingdom shows us that they are to be regarded as almost, if not quite, the highest products of the evolution of that ancient Aztec-American flora whose descendants they are.

And so we are brought to realize that they were worthy recipients of all the attention Engelmann and his co-workers bestowed; and the history of their investigations becomes almost as interesting as the plants themselves. Foremost of all, as has been said, stand the labors of Engelmann; but with him are associated the names of many untiring explorers and enthusiastic botanists, each of whom contributed some vital element to the general outcome: Wislizenus, Emory, Torrey, Parry, Schott, Palmer, Newberry—all were workers in the field, and their names have gone down in the annals of botany appended to one species or another of the genera they studied, fittingly commemorating the aid they gave toward awakening scientific interest in this Southwestern plant group. Engelmann gathered together the work of all and compiled it in his masterly monographs, taking up first the cacti, then the yuccas, and finally the agaves. From time to time he published additional notes, as new store of information came to him, presenting most of the matter to the St. Louis Academy of Sciences, of which he was for years the leading support. Up to the month he died he was working over the great mass of notes he had accumulated on the cacti, preparatory to publishing a grand revision of his first monograph. That the work could not be completed is a source of deepest regret to living botanists; but, nevertheless, the original monograph still stands, and will continue to stand, as the backbone of our knowledge of the family it treats. And as to the other two monographs, the past decade has been able to add little to them of vital importance save in so far as more extended observations have served to more fully develop Engelmann's views. With justice, therefore, is Engelmann accorded a prominent place among scientists; but inseparably linked with his is the name of another man, honored as a broad-spirited patron of science, Henry Shaw, the founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden, on the outskirts of St. Louis. This was the pride of Engelmann's heart, and it was here that he constantly labored under the liberal patronage and never-failing encouragement of Shaw. The two men worked and planned together in their common interest, and as a result we find in the Missouri Garden to-day species of cacti numbering in the hundreds, of agaves more than half a hundred, and the better