x thousand years. The ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks
and Romans grew the vine and made wine from its fruit. Grape seeds
have been found in the remains of European peoples of prehistoric
times, showing that primitive men enlivened their scanty fare with
wild grapes. Cultivation of the grape in the Old World probably began
in the region about the Caspian Sea where the vine has always run
wild. We have proof of the great antiquity of the grape in Egypt, for
its seeds are found entombed with the oldest mummies. Probably the
Phoenicians, the earliest navigators on the Mediterranean, carried the
grape from Egypt and Syria to Greece, Rome and other countries
bordering on this sea. The domestication of the grape was far advanced
in Christ's time, for Pliny, writing then, describes ninety-one kinds
of grapes and fifty kinds of wine.

[Illustration: FIG. 1. A shoot of _Vitis vinifera_.]

It can never be known exactly when the European grape came under
cultivation. There is no word as to what were the methods and
processes of domestication, and whose the minds and hands that
remodeled the wild grape of Europe into the grape of the vineyards.
The Old World grape was domesticated long before the faint traditions
which have been transmitted to our day could possibly have arisen. For
knowledge of how wild species of this fruit have been and may be
brought under cultivation, we must turn to New World records.

AMERICAN GRAPES

Few other plants in the New World grow wild under such varied
conditions and over such extended areas as the grape. Wild grapes are
found in the warmer parts of New Brunswick; on the shores of the Great
Lakes; everywhere in the woodlands of the North and Middle Atlantic
states; on the limestone soils of Kentucky, Tennessee and the
Virginias; and they thrive in the sandy woods, sea plains and
reef-keys of the South Atlantic and Gulf states. While not so common
west of the Mississippi, yet some kind of wild grape is found from
North Dakota to Texas; grapes grow on the mountains and in the canons
of all the Rocky Mountain states; and several species thrive on the
Mexican borders and in the far Southwest.

While it is possible that all American grapes have descended from an
original species, the types are now as diverse as the regions they
inhabit. The wild grapes of the forests have long slender trunks and
branches, whereby their leaves are better exposed to the sunlight. Two
shrubby species do not a