20 Rhodora [FEBRUARY 
beries” on the coast of Nova Scotia should not be taken as indicating 
that he found Grapes; for a search of botanical writings from the 
earliest herbals to the latest publications upon the colloquial names of 
plants in Scandinavia and Great Britain fails to reveal any use of 
either the name “vinber” or “ Wine-berry" for the Grape. But, on 
the other hand, in the more northern countries of Europe at the present 
day, the names “vinber” and “ Wine-berry” are still used as folk- 
names for some of the identical wild fruits which bore those names in 
the Middle Ages. The Grape, it should be kept in mind, is a fruit of 
southern Europe and adjacent Asia and Africa, which, when culti- 
vated even in southern England, is ordinarily given artificial protection; ! 
and in southern Norway it can be cultivated with success only south of 
latitude 61°, and then only when trained against a warm reflecting 
wall.’ 
It seems highly improbable, then, that the Grape should have been 
familiar, at least from personal experience, to the early Norsemen 
who sailed from Iceland and Greenland to the western continent. 
And, in view of the fact that the true Grape is called in Scandinavian 
vindrufva, it is not likely that the Norsemen, if they knew this foreign 
fruit at all, would have applied to it the name vinber, when they 
already used the latter name for a common and very different wild 
fruit of Norway. 
In the early days of botanical studies in northern Europe an attempt 
was made to identify all the plants of Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, 
England, and other northern regions with the plants described from 
the Mediterranean by Pliny, Theophrastus, and other classical writers 
upon Natural History. It thus happened that botanists, as late as the 
17th and 18th centuries, were still identifying the Currants (Ribes) 
of northern Europe with the Corinth or Currant (Vitis) of southern 
Europe and Asia Minor. Thus, in 1633, Thomas Johnson urged 
that the “Red Currans," which were “found plentifully growing in 
many gardens,” should no longer be confused with the Currant (small 
raisin) of the Mediterranean, saying “ yet must they not be confounded 
‘with those Currans which are brought from Zant, and the continent 
1 See Nicholson, Dictionary of Gardening, iv. 162-170 (1887). 
2“"Um in Norwegen mit einigem Erfolg im Freien Reben zu ziehen, ist das Spalier 
unerlüsslich. Ueber den 61sten Breitegrad hinaus dürfte aber auch diese Culturart 
nicht genügen, um im Freien reife Trauben zu gewinnen," 
— Schübeler, Die Culturpflanzen Norwegens, 97 (1862). 
