Grape pollen does not keep well and an effort should be made to have it as fresh as possible. The work of pollination is best performed in bright, sunny weather when the pollen is very dry. As may be seen from the foregoing statements, tools and methods are of less importance than care in doing the work. The only tool absolutely necessary is a pair of forceps, although a hand-lens is often helpful. Bags for covering the flowers should be just large enough and no larger. A bag to cover the pollen-producing flower may well be an ordinary manilla bag sufficiently large to amply cover the flower-cluster. It is helpful, however, to have a light transparent oiled bag through which one can see the condition of the anthers. It is desirable that the bag for the female flower be permitted to remain until the fruits ripen as a protection against birds and fungi. It must, therefore, be of larger size. While the bags are still flat, a hole is made near the opening through which a string is passed which can be tied when the upper end of the bag is squeezed about the cluster. _Choosing the parents._ Very much depends on the immediate parentage in hybridizing grapes. Some varieties when crossed produce much higher averages of worthy offspring than others. There is so much difference in varieties in this respect that to discover parents so endowed should be the first task of the grape-breeder. Fortunately, considerable work has been done by several experiment stations in breeding grapes, and their accumulated knowledge, together with that from such workers as Rogers, Ricketts, Campbell and Munson, furnishes beginners with good starting points. There is no way possible of discovering what the best progenitors are except by records of performance. Very often varieties of high cultural value are worthless in breeding because their characters seem not to be transmitted to their progeny and, to the contrary, a good-for-nothing variety in the vineyard is often valuable in breeding. From present knowledge it does not appear that new characters are introduced in plants by hybridizing. A new variety originating from hybridization is but a recombination of the characters of the parents; the combination is new but the characters are not. Thus, one parent of a hybridized grape may contribute color, size, flavor and practically all the characters of the fruit, while the other parent may contribute vigor, hardiness, resistance to disease and the characters of the vine. Or these and other characters in the make-up of a new grape may be intermingled in any mathematical way possible. The grape-breeder must make certain that one or the other of the parents possesses the particular characters he desires in his new grape.