ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED FRUITS 27 
are grown, all descended from a single species, tis wnifera, 
supposed to be indigenous to Asia. 
Curiously enough, these European cultivated varieties failed 
utterly to grow in the eastern United States,! and our early fore- 
fathers suffered much extremity, or thought they did, by their 
inability to grow the European grape for wine, some good chron- 
iclers going so far as to express a doubt if the Creator had ever 
intended such a country for human habitation. 
Failing? in the attempts to grow the European grapes, the 
settlers naturally turned their attention to the native species that 
clambered everywhere and that early attracted attention. Thus 
Captain John Smith, for example, in the quaint language of the 
times (1607—1609) writes of the wild grapes of Virginia that they 
“climbe the toppes of the highest trees’’; and speaking of the 
fruit, he says, ‘‘ They bee fatte and the iuyce thicke: neither 
doth the tast so well please when they are made in wine.” ? From 
which we see that the attention of the time was mainly upon wine. 
“America is the land of the grape,” says Bailey,* who lists no 
less than twenty-two distinct species and thirteen varieties of 
grape native to the United States. The principal species are the 
following, which, directly or through their hybrids with the Old 
World wine grape, 1”. vinifera, have given rise to our common 
American cultivated varieties, distinguished by their round, juicy, 
many-seeded fruits as distinct from the fleshy European (now 
California) species : 
1. Vitis rotundifolia, the muscadine or Southern fox grape.° 
Delaware to Florida and west to Kansas and Texas, and parent 
of the large musky Scuppernong. 
1 This was due, as we now know, to certain diseases that killed the leaves, 
probably the downy mildew and black rot. These grapes have been since grown 
out of doors in California for raisins, wine, and for shipping, and they appear 
on our markets now as the thick-meated “ California grapes.” 
2 The story of this failure is finely told by Bailey in his “ The Evolution of 
our Native Fruits.” 
3 Evolution of our Native Fruits,” p. 4. 
4 Ibid., pp. 98-117. 
5 Called by Gray, Vitis vulpina. 
