Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/351

Rh lacking sweetness and richness, they do hot cloy the appetite so quickly. The bunches and berries of the vinifera grapes are larger, more attractive, and are borne in greater quantities. The pulp, seeds and skins are somewhat objectionable in all of the native species and scarcely so at all in Vitis vinifera. The berries of the native grapes shell from the stems so quickly that the bunches do not ship well. The vines of the Old World grapes are more compact in habit and require less pruning and training than do those of the native grapes, and, as a species, probably through long cultivation, they are adapted to more kinds of soil, to greater differences in environment, and are more easily propagated than the American species.

Because of these points of superiority in the Old World grape, since Valk, Allen and Rogers showed the way, American grape-breeders have sought to unite by hybridization the good characters of Vitis vinifera with those of the American grapes. Nearly half of the fifteen hundred grapes cultivated in eastern America have more or less vinifera blood in them. Yet despite the efforts of breeders few of these hybrids have commercial value. Whether because they are naturally better fixed, or long cultivation has more firmly established them, the vine