64 THE EVOLUTION OF OUR NATIVE FRUITS 



man in the West, we are most indebted for our knowledge 

 in grape culture. Mr. Longworth has, within the last 

 twenty-seven years, with unwearied zeal and a liberal 

 expenditure of money, in numerous experiments with 

 foreign and native grapes, succeeded in enabling himself 

 and others to present to the public a sparkling Catawba, 

 rivaling the best French Champagne, and a dry wine 

 from the same grape, that compares favorably with the 

 celebrated Hock wine of the Rhine." 



But Longworth was also an early and ardent advo- 

 cate of the cultivation of the strawberry, and wrote 

 the first American treatise upon that fruit, before 1850, 

 when Cincinnati, in the language of Robert Buchanan, 

 had become "famous for her fine sugar- cured hams, 

 sparkling Catawba wines, and a cheap and abundant 

 strawberry market." Longworth was "the chief dis- 

 seminator of that most important fact, the sexual 

 character of the strawbeny," as Hooper puts it ; by 

 which it is meant that he expounded the fact that the 

 flowers of some varieties of strawberries lack stamens, 

 and that stamen -bearing varieties must be planted 

 with them to insure fertilization. This fact had been 

 observed long before his time. Dufour, for example, 

 had taken note of it. But it remained for Longworth 

 to fully expound it to the horticulturist. 



Longworth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 

 1783 ; he died in Cincinnati, where he had lived for 

 about sixty years, in 1863. The Bishop of Cincinnati, 

 J. B. Purcell, wrote in 1841 of Mr. Longworth "from, 

 long and intimate acquaintance" as "one of the wealth- 

 iest, most intelligent, and enterprising citizens of Cin- 

 cinnati." The editor of the "Horticulturist," upon the 

 occasion of Mr. Longworth's death in 1863, wrote: 



