Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/226

222 (an idea tersely suggested by Perrine, and for the successful application of which, as I read, a large sum was later paid to another) the pulp is removed. The fiber, suitably washed and dried, is then baled for export. In the state of Vera Cruz a plant of the same group has recently come into local prominence, and is said to be considerably planted under the name 'zapupe,' and to yield an excellent fiber.

One of the agaves longest known in gardens is that for which botanists are now restoring the name A. Vera Cruz which Miller applied to it, following its earlier polynomial designation of 'Aloe America ex Vera Cruce foliis latioribus et glaucis.' Like the henequen, it yields a fiber for which it is somewhat cultivated in the state of Vera Cruz; and I understand that it is this species to which the Agave Americana of Indian fiber-culture reports refers.

In India, for a century and a half or more, has been known another agave which is properly called A. Cantula, though it is frequently

spoken of under the name A. Roxburghii, which was given to it later. Erroneously, it is even more often designated by the name A. vivipara, which, as used by Linnæus, belongs to a very different plant common in the Greater Antilles. This species, the source of a considerable quantity of Indian fiber which is known in the market as Bombay aloe, and of a small but increasing amount of Philippine fiber under the name 'Manila aloe,' is a close relative of the Tequila mezcal. Adequate study will probably result in its final positive identification with some American species; but at present it shares with another Indian species of the same group the distinction of representing in Asia a genus otherwise exclusively American—if the generally discredited hypothesis that the century plant is indigenous to the Mediterranean region be not true.

In comparison with the great cultures of henequen, all of the other