192 American Horticultural Society. 



permitting the waters of the Black sea to pour into the lower steppe levels. 

 We learn that engineers are now at work on surveys and estimates of cost, 

 and that the scheme has far more credit among European capitalists than 

 had the Suez canal, or the present great scheme of De Lesseps to unite the 

 Atlantic and Pacitic at Darien. 



At the close of Prof. Biuld's lecture the Presiilent iutro<lueed 

 Mr. Cutter, of Riverside, who read the following paper: 



LIMITATIONS OF RAISIN GRAPE CULTURE. 



BY J. E. CUTTER, OF CALIFORNIA. 



Physicists have divided climates into two general classes— continental 

 and oceanic. The latter are distingui-shed by equability, their temperature 

 having no wide annual range. In North .America they are found alon.ij; the 

 entire Pacitic cojist, extending inland as far as the great continental divide, 

 except where the Cascades and main Sierras interpose a previous barrier. 

 That of Florida and the close borders of the Gulf of Mexico belong to the 

 same class. Crossing the Atlantic, we find all of Western Europe and all 

 shores of the Mediterranean in the same order. Over all those sections most 

 members of the vinifera family of grapes range, except where northern 

 severity bars out their running vines. But the Muscat has hugged the ilry, 

 warm slopes that face this great inland sea from the time when wise Abigail 

 met the anointed but fugitive king of Israel with the present of " a hun- 

 dred clusters ' of its sweet fruit. If any one questions whether those raisins 

 were Muscatels, it is in order for him to explain of what variety they were! 



No district of perennial rains seems adapted to its growth, and as in 

 Europe it will not thrive inland and along the cool wet coasts of the Atlantic, 

 go in America it does not succeed in Florida and along the gulf. Its lield 

 is in Arizona and California, and its capricious choice is not suited even 

 with all parts of these. We know that it requires warm air and warm soil, 

 but we can not tell why it succeeds at Orange, in Los Angeles county, and 

 fails amid the vast wine grape vineyards of the San Gabriel valley, and by 

 the base of the Sierra Madre ; then crossing to the eastern side of the great 

 San Bernardino valley, reaches its highest limit of production and profit on 

 the iron-grained silt of Riverside and Redlands, whose climate and soil ditfer 

 widely from those of Orange. Here in both of these unlike soils it thrives, 

 while it rejects their medium. Of all its family, the Muscat seems most sen- 

 sitive to cold, wet and disease. Wherever other members of the vinifera 

 species fail, it will also fail, but the converse is not true. It prefers to get 

 its water from a ditch rather than from the clouds. (The rancher prefers it 

 also when he has 3,("W trays of its sweet pellets drying under an October 

 sky.) Irrigable mesa lamls must ever form its principle fields, though there 

 are some warm lands that have water in sub-strata ten feet, more or less, 

 from the surface that bring the same by capillary action to the roots, suffi- 

 cient and not in excess. 



