GRAPES. 63 



it served as a means of educating the penchant of people for this fruit up to 

 such a point as led to an appreciation for higher quality, and prepared them 

 to accept the more laborious and pains-taking task of winning success with 

 that and other finer but more exacting varieties. 



Although, from the first, our better informed and more discriminating fruit 

 growers, were conscious that the Concord was lacking in high quality, and 

 hence accepted it merely as filling a vacant place, till something more desirable 

 should arise, and although numerous varieties, in some important particulars 

 decidedly improved, have arisen to meet this deficiency; no one has yet been 

 found capable of supplying the high quality desired, except at the sacrifice of 

 more or less of the valuable points which have so strongly recommended this 

 for general cultivation as a market variety. True the Delaware is to a consid- 

 erable extent encroaching upon it in our markets, and also as a family fruit, 

 and it is earnestly to be hoped that such encroachment will go on at an accel- 

 erated rate ; still for the great mass of n6n-appreciative growers, as well as 

 buyers, we are compelled to fall back upon the Concord, and the more appro- 

 priately so for the reason that it seems to be improved in quality, as we go 

 south, and indeed in some localities, as in Missouri, it has come to assume the 

 position of the leading wine grape. In Michigan it will usually ripen from the 

 middle to the last of September. 



THE HAKTFORD PROLIFIC 



sprang up as an accidental seedling in the garden of Raphio Steele and Son, of 

 West Hartford, Connecticut, and first fruited about the year 1849. It was 

 introduced to the public, and its history published in a letter to the Magazine 

 of Horticulture, then published by C. M. Hovey at Boston, dated February 

 13th, 1852 ; written by Gurdon W. Russell, of Hartford, who stated that it had 

 been upon the tables of the Hartford County Horticultural Society for three 

 years, and that Mr. Steele had shown well-ripened specimens on the sixth of 

 the previous September; at least two weeks before the ripening of the Isabella 

 in that locality, and that this Society had conferred upon it the name Hartford 

 Prolific. The letter of Mr. Russell closes with the following paragraphs: " Of 

 course it is not to take the place of the Isabella ; the grape is yet to be, that 

 will do that; but for certain localities it is, in our opinion, just the grape. In 

 the mountain towns in this State, the Isabella does not ripen one year in four ; 

 in some of them not at all. For those places this variety is to be recom- 

 mended ; being early, and of good flavor, with very little foxiness, and infinitely • 

 superior to the whole herd of wild grapes." 



This is certainly a very commendably modest introduction, and is indeed 

 one of the very few cases in which the introducer of a new candidate for public 

 favor has failed to over-estimate it. 



It was shown, with a letter of introduction from the same gentleman at the 

 session of the American Pomological Society held at Boston in September, 

 1854, where it elicited the following notice from the committee on native 

 fruits: 



" Bunch medium size, loose ; berry medium size, round or nearly so, black ; pulp 

 large, sweet, juicy, with a strong foxy perfume ; scarcelv good. (Very early.) 



" W. D. BRINCKLE, Chairman^ 



It is described in the latest revised edition of Downing's Frtiits and Fruit 

 Trees of America as follows: 



"Bunch large, shouldered, rather compact. Berry large, globular, with a 



