VITIS VINIFERA. 
Its culture is supposed to have been introduced from the 
East, where it was cultivated, and wine made from the fruit, 
in the earliest ages. Weare told that Noah, after coming out 
of the ark, planted a vineyard, and drank of the wine, and 
was drunken. Gen. ix. 20,21. It extended into Italy about 
600 years after the foundation of Rome, and thence to Bur- 
gundy in the time of the Antonines. It was introduced into 
Madeira from the island of Cyprus in the fifteenth century. 
In Great Britain the vine was cultivated before the year 731, 
when Bede finished his history, and although it was at one 
period brought to considerable perfection, yet its cultivation 
is now chiefly confined to the garden, and as a dessert fruit. 
The vine has a slender, twisted, climbing stem, covered 
with a rough, peeling, fibrous bark. The leaves are lobed and 
sinuated, serrated, and placed alternately on long footstalks. 
The flowers, which appear in June and July, are small and 
- produced in clusters, attended by tendrils. The calyx is very 
minute. The petals are of a greenish-white color, adherent 
at their apices, and soon fall off, like a little cap, from the | 
anthers, which then spread and shed their pollen. The fruit 
is a succulent, globular berry, one-celled when ripe, naturally 
containing five seeds, but in general only two, which are hard 
and of an irregular form. ‘There are many varieties of the 
vine; that which is called the Alexandrian Frontignac yields 
the most delicious grapes for eating, and the Syrian the largest 
bunches. This is supposed to be the sort of grape which the - 
spies sent by Moses to examine Canaan cut down at the — = 
brook Eshcol, “a branch with one cluster of grapes,and they 
bare it between two upon a staff.” Mum.xiii.23. Strabo re- 
lates, that in Margiana bunches of grapes were produced two 
cubits or a yard long, and in some of the Archipelago islands 
they weigh from thirty to forty pounds. The Syrian grape has 
produced in England bunches weighing nineteen pounds and 
a half. ‘There is a grape cultivated in Madeira as a dessert 
fruit, the clusters of which sometimes weigh twenty pounds. 
The Viris vinirera has become naturalized in most tem- _ 
perate climates, but is supposed not to be indigenous to the 
United States. No plant in the vegetable kingdom possesses 
more interesting attributes, is cultivated with greater care, 
has been worse perverted or abused by mankind, than the 
ik 
