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Show A 'NOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 349 rate drawings in Adrien de Jussieu's Cours de Botanique, pp. 77-79, fig. 105-108.) (26) p. 243.-" The form of Aloes." To this group of plants, characterized by so great a similarity of physiognomy, belong: Yucca aloifolia, which extends as far north as Florida and South Carolina; Y. angustifolia (Nutt.), which advances as far as the banks of the Missouri ; Aletris arborea; the Dragon-tree of 'the Canaries and two other Dracrenas from New Zealand; arborescent Euphorbias; Aloe dichotoma (Linn.) (formerly the genus Rhipidodendrum of Willdenow); and the celebrated Koker-boom of Southern Africa, with a trunk twenty-one feet high and above four feet thick, and a top of 400 (426 English) feet in circumference. (Patterson, Reisen in das Land der Hottentotten und der Kaffern, 1790, s. 55.) The forms which I have thus brought together belong to very different families : to the Liliacere, Asphodelere, Pandanere, Amaryllidere, and Euphorbiacere; all, however, with the exception of the last, belonging to the great division of the Monocotyledones. A Pandanea, Phytelephas macrocarpa (Ruiz), which we found in New Granada on the banks of the Magdalena, with its pinnated leaves, quite resembles in appearance a small palm-tree. This Phytelephas, of which the Indian name is Tagua, is besides, as Kunth remarks, the only one of the Pandanere found (according to our present knowledge) in the New Continent. The singular Agave-like and at the same time very tall-stemmed Doryanthes excelsa of New South Wales, which was first described by the acutely observing Correa de Serra, is an Amaryllidea, like our low-growing Narcissuses and Jonquils. In the Candelabra shape of plants of the Aloe form, we must not confound the branches of an arborescent stem with flower stalks. It is the latter which in the American Aloe (Agave Americana, Maguey de Cocuyza, which is entirely wanting in Chili) as well as in the Yucca acaulis (Maguey de Cocuy), presents in the rapid and gigantic development of the inflorescence, a candelabrum-like arrangement of the flowers which, as is well known, is but too transient a phenomenon. In some arborescent Euphorbias, on the other hand, the physiognomic effect is given by the branches and their division, or 30 |