CHAPTER XVI 



GBAPE VARIETIES 



"Ah, with the grape my fading life provide." — Omar. 



The cultivation of most of our modern 

 fruits dates back many centuries, but of them 

 all the grape was perhaps the first to be culti- 

 vated on an extensive scale. Its history is 

 lost in remote antiquity and we will never know 

 who were the first to plant vines and to make 

 wine from the ripened fruit — for the two have 

 gone hand in hand from the very beginning. 

 We do know that the vine was often mentioned 

 by the early Bible characters and that grapes 

 were grown by the Egyptians long before the 

 time of written history. The fact that this 

 was one of the first of the cultivated fruits is 

 still further emphasized by the knowledge that 

 grape culture has changed but little in thirty 

 centuries and that the directions for the care 

 of the vine published a thousand years B. C. 

 still conform to modern practice, — when 

 applied to the growing of European varieties. 



The ancient grapes were identical with the 

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