The Grape. 107 



design. All miniatures and dainty little pictures were 

 originally encircled with representations of the foliage. 

 Hence, the French word being vigne, we still call such 

 miniatures vignettes. 



The native country of the grape-vine was long a matter 

 of uncertainty and dispute. It is now tolerably well 

 determined that the original locality was the tract which 

 stretches from the hills on the southern border of the 

 Caspian, in latitude 37, to the shores of the Persian Gulf 

 and the Indian Ocean, and eastwards, through Khorassan 

 and Cabul, to the base of the Himala3 T as. At the present 

 day, in the Caucasus of Cashmere, it climbs to the tops of 

 the tallest trees, disporting itself with all the luxuriant 

 carelessness of a tropical passion-flower, and producing 

 fruit in abundance, especially when near streams of water. 

 That these seemingly wild vines are the absolute descend- 

 ants or posterity of the primaeval plants must not be too 

 hastily or certainly concluded. They may possibly be 

 no more than mementoes of ancient cultivation in those 

 particular spots, just as in England at the present day 

 we often find memorials of gardens and orchards long 

 since extinguished. The pathetic lines, 



" Near yonder copse, where once a garden smiled, 

 And still where many a garden flower grows wild," 



supply a text, we may be sure, illustrated in every country 

 where man has tilled the soil. Birds, too, would carry the 

 seeds far and wide. The vines apparently wild in some 

 parts of southern Europe, as in Greece and Italy, are 

 almost certainly by derivation from the primitive vine- 



