EUROPEAN GRAPES DIE IN THE EAST 
were sent over from France. They brought their best 
vines and applied the greatest skill to their cultivation. 
The vines grew through two or three seasons, languished, 
and died. 
In the meantime the wild grapes grew luxuriantly. 
The colonists cultivated them and improved their varie¬ 
ties. The people of the eastern states became accus¬ 
tomed to eating the descendants of these native grapes. 
The people of the Pacific Coast, on the contrary, grew 
only the aristocratic European varieties that man had 
grown and improved for ten thousand years. 
Finally, in the early part of this century, the cause of 
the blight on European grapes in the East was discovered. 
Throughout that region there existed an insect, a plant 
louse called phylloxera, which got into the roots of the 
grapevines and caused swellings, or galls, on them. The 
American varieties of vines had lived with this insect for 
thousands of years, had got used to it, and could get along 
in spite of it, but it was fatal to the imported varieties. 
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