290 GENETICS IN RELATION TO AGRICULTURE 
new varieties stood the test of years and his work served to stimulate 
further efforts to improve the most important horticultural crop of 
America. 
Ephraim Wales Bull produced the Concord grape as a result of 
eleven years of patient work in crossing the native species, Vitis labrusca, 
with European varieties, raising the seedlings and testing selections. 
“From over 22,000 seedlings there are 21 which I consider valuable,” 
he writes. Although the hybrid nature of the Concord and other deriva- 
tives of Vitis labrusca has been questioned, the evidence from extensive 
tests of selfed seedlings of this and several other standard American 
varieties as reported by Hedrick and Anthony seem to indicate that 
they are really hybrids between American species if not between V. 
labrusca and V. vinifera. Whatever the origin of the Concord may 
have been, its sterling value is evidenced by its history. Introduced 
in 1853, ‘“‘ten years later the Concord grape was spread over the entire 
northern part of the United States and is now widely used in the temperate 
regions of most parts of the earth.” Ephraim Bull’s service to his 
fellow men seems to have been all but forgotten while he was still living, 
since ‘‘he died neglected, in poverty, broken in spirit.’? Vast as would 
be the value of his contribution if it could be computed, even more 
valuable was the inspiration he gave, ‘‘which has helped to make plant 
breeding one of the great forces in cheaply feeding the world.!” 
The demands and possibilities of developing agriculture aroused 
the ambitions of two far-sighted agriculturists—Martin Hope Sutton 
and Pierre Louis Frangois Lévéque de Vilmorin. A student of botany 
from his boyhood, Sutton had already made improvements in a number 
of plants when the Irish potato famine of 1847 drew public attention 
to his work through the substitutes which he suggested for the devas- 
tated potato crop. Later on the introduction of the Golden Tankard 
mangel, the Magnum Bonum potato, and the Marrowfat pea helped to 
establish the high reputation which the firm of Sutton and Sons came 
to hold throughout the world. They greatly improved many flowers as 
well as crop plants. Sutton’s ‘‘Permanent Pastures” is still a standard 
work on grasses. 
In 1843 Vilmorin took charge of the seed establishment which had 
already passed through the hands of two generations of this remarkable 
family. His father, André Lévéque de Vilmorin, had conducted a selec- 
tion experiment with carrots about ten years earlier. Besides the main- 
1 The earliest hybridizers of grapes in America, according to Waugh, were Dr. 
Wm. Valk of Long Island (1845) and John Fisk Allen of Massachusetts (1846 or 47). 
Waugh also states that the two foremost American grape hybridists are E. 8. Rogers 
of Massachusetts, who began in 1848 and distributed many numbered seedlings for 
trial in 1858, and T. V. Munson of Texas, who has probably added more to the prac- 
tical American fruit list in his hybrid grapes than has any other plant breeder. 
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