156 HISTORICAL NOTES ON 



The olive grows naturally in the East, from Greece and Syria 

 to Persia and Affghanistan, and is without doubt I'eally indigenous 

 to the whole of that region. It is also found wild in great 

 abundance in Southern Italy, but how far it may there be the 

 degenerate offspring of self-sown olives from cultivated sources, is 

 a matter of much dispute among Italian writers, and is here 

 discussed by Prof. Targioni, who concludes with much plausibility 

 that it is a true native. 



The Grape Vine (Vitis vinifera) must, as already observed by 

 Pliny, be ranked amongst trees on account of the prodigious size 

 it will attain."' This may be more especially observed in the 

 Maremma, Avhere it grows wild in the greatest abundance. It 

 appears to be there, as in other parts of Southern Europe, truly 

 indigenous, extending from thence over the greater part of South- 

 central Asia, for the Vitis indica, on the testimony of the more 

 recent Indian botanists, is by no means specifically distinct. 

 From these wild vines have evidently been raised the 

 innumerable varieties cultivated over the greater part of Europe, 

 Asia, and North Africa, and now carried out to all parts of the 

 globe where the climate will admit of it. But the period when 

 it was first taken into cultivation, is lost in the obscure ages of 

 antiquity. We read in the Genesis that after the flood Noah 

 began to plant the vine ; the heathens ascribed its first intro- 

 duction to their fabulous heroes or divinities, Diodorus Siculus to 

 Osiris, Servius to Saturn, and in the most ancient times Italy was 

 called (Enotria from the wine that it produced. 



* Among the instances given of enormous vines, we may quote the 

 following : Pliny records a vine in the Porticos of Livia, which over- 

 shadowed the whole area used as a promenade, and yielded annually twenty- 

 two amphoras (1 54 gallons) of wine ; the same writer states that he had seen 

 at Populonia a statue of Jupiter, made of the trunk of a vine, and that the 

 columns of the temple of Juno at Metapoutus, and the steps of that of 

 Diana of Ephesus, were also of vine wood. In more modern days, Soderini 

 mentions a vine in Portico di Romagua, which extended over 1000 hraccia 

 (2000 feet) ; in the Mdm. de I'Academic of Paris for 1737, a muscat vine at 

 Balanfon, is described, which at twenty years old produced 4206 bunches of 

 grapes. Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, our author's grandfather, in his 

 travels in Tuscany, quotes one in the woods near Montebamboli, the ti-unk 

 of which two men could not embrace. Santi found a vine at Castellottieri 

 in the Maremma, torn up by a storm in 1787, who.se trunk is preserved in 

 tlie botanic garden at Pisa, with a stem five and a half feet in circumference ; 

 aud Prof Targioni has himself recordedin the article "Botanical Chronology " 

 in tlie Dictionary of Natural History, printed at Florence by Batelli, two 

 vines near Piglini, in the upper Val d'Arno, with trunks five feet in 

 circumfei-ence. The doors of the Cathedral of Ravenna ai-e made of vine 

 wood. 



