Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/349

Rh

That our best grapes have come from chance is not because of a lack of human effort to produce superior varieties. Of all fruits the grape has received most attention in America from the generation of plant-breeders just passing. Their product is represented by fifteen hundred varieties, a medley of the more or less heterogeneous characters of a dozen species. That these have not excelled is due more to a lack of knowledge of plant-breeding than to a lack of effort. Now that order and system, undreamed of a generation ago, have been disclosed by the brilliant discoveries in plant-breeding of the last decade, future efforts to improve grapes ought to be more fruitful than those of the past.

As early as 1822, Nuttall, a noted botanist, then at Harvard, recommended "hybrids betwixt the European vine and those of the United States which would better answer the variable climates of North America." In 1830 William Robert Prince, fourth proprietor of the then famous Linnean botanic nursery at Flushing, Long Island, grew ten thousand seedling grapes "from an admixture under every variety of circumstance." This was probably the first attempt on a large scale to improve the native grapes by hybridizing, though little seems to have come of it. Later a Dr. Valk, also of Flushing, grew hybrids from which he obtained the Ada, the first named hybrid, the introduction of which started hybridizers to work in all parts of the country where grapes were grown.

Soon after Valk's hybrid was sent out, E. S. Rogers, of Salem, Massachusetts, and J. H. Ricketts, of Newburgh, New York, began to give viticulturists hybrids of the European vinifera and the American species which were so promising that enthusiasm and speculation in grape growing ran riot. Never before nor since has grape-growing received the attention in America given it during the decade succeeding the