WHAT FRUITS ARE AMELIORATED 449 



the improvement of our native fruits, is the fact that 

 in nearly every case the amelioration has come from 

 the force of circumstances and not from the choice or 

 design of men. Let me be specific. The colonists 

 in common with other good people knew and loved 

 wine. The beverage has been a hand to hand or 

 more truthfully a hand to mouth companion of the 

 human family from the first. The attempt was there- 

 fore early and heroically made to grow the European 

 or wine grape in eastern America ; but the attempt 

 failed. In sheer distress of failure, the grape -grower 

 was driven to the use of the native grape. How 

 literally true this was the reader may learn by read- 

 ing the history of the grape colony of the Dufours in 

 Kentucky and then in Indiana late in the last century 

 and early in this, and noting the fact that the exist- 

 ence of the colony, as such, depended upon the success 

 of the wine. The salvation of the colony was the Alex- 

 ander or Cape grape, which, in a most surreptitious 

 way, had transferred itself from the wild into planta- 

 tions which were at first designed to grow the Euro- 

 pean varieties ; and later on, John Adi urn's famous 

 Catawba, a product of the Carolina highlands, added 

 the crowning glory and success to the experiment, 

 and thence spread itself along the Ohio and over 

 the Union. And yet, while the Alexander and the 

 Catawba were driving out the Old World types, the 

 grape -growers were at the very time making a most 

 determined opposition to native grapes. The fact is 

 that the native grapes the types which we now culti- 

 vate came into domestication in spite of us. 



The native plums of which two hundred or moro 

 horticultural varieties are now described came into 



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