AMERICAN GRAPES 



345 



That our best grapes have come from chance is not because of a 

 lack of human effoit to produce superior varieties. Of all fruits the 

 grape has received most attention in America from the generation of 

 plant-breeders just passing. Their product is represented by fifteen 

 hundred varieties, a medley of the more or less heterogeneous characters 

 of a dozen species. That these have not excelled is due more to a lack 

 of knowledge of plant-breeding than to a lack of effort. Now that 

 order and system, undreamed of a generation ago, have been disclosed 

 by the brilliant discoveries in plant-breeding of the last decade, future 

 effoits to improve grapes ought to be more fruitful than those of the past. 



As early as 1822, Nuttall, a noted botanist, then at Harvard, recom- 

 mended " hybrids betwixt the European vine and those of the United 

 States which would better answer the variable climates of North 

 America." In 1830 William Eobert Prince, fourth proprietor of the 

 then famous Linnean botanic nursery at Flushing, Long Island, grew 

 ten thousand seedling grapes " from an admixture under every variety 

 of circumstance." This was probably the first attempt on a large scale 

 to improve the native grapes by hybridizing, though little seems to 

 have come of it. Later a Dr. Valk, also of Flushing, grew hybrids from 

 which he obtained the Ada, the first named hybrid, the introduction of 

 which started hybridizers to work in all parts of the country where 

 grapes were grown. 



Soon after Valk's hybrid was sent out, E. S. Rogers, of Salem, Mas- 

 sachusetts, and J. H. Eicketts, of Newburgh, New York, began to give 

 viticulturists hybrids of the European vinifera and the American spe- 

 cies which were so promising that enthusiasm and speculation in grape- 

 growing ran riot. Never before nor since has grape-growing received 

 the attention in America given it during the decade succeeding the 



VOL. LXXXII.— 24. 



