Currants. 127 



for cakes and puddings, simply as Currants. Little or 

 nothing is known of its earliest history, though the plant 

 was certainly in cultivation before the time of Queen 

 Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh being said to have had 

 some sort of monopoly of the importation into this 

 country. These are the genuine and original " currants," 

 the word being a corruption of the epithet in uvcz Corin- 

 thtactz, " Corinthian grapes," by which name they were 

 called when first brought from Greece, the native country. 

 The geographical range of the successful culture, like 

 that of the muscatel raisin, is very limited, and from 

 similar causes. The metropolis of the district in which 

 the plant flourishes is Patras, whence the fruit has some- 

 times the appellation of the Patras currant. Of the 

 eighty-six thousand five hundred tons exported from 

 Greece in the thrice-famous currant-year, 1876, when all 

 the vegetable products of Greece were exceptionally 

 abundant, seventy-one thousand were the produce of the 

 Morea, including a few grown in the neighbourhood of 

 Missolonghi. The balance of fifteen thousand five hun- 

 dred was despatched from the southern Ionian islands, 

 including Zante and Cephalonia. Corinth, singular to 

 say, produces none at all, though the grape is successfully 

 cultivated there for wine-making. The actual localities 

 of the cultivation are confined to a narrow belt of country 

 near the coast. The vineyards are mostly within a hun- 

 dred and fifty feet of the sea-level j they rarely exceed 

 four hundred feet ; the elevation is thus markedly lower 

 than that to which ordinary grape-culture may be carried. 



