The grape is preeminently a North American plant. The genus Vitis is a large one, from thirty to fifty species being distinguished for the world; more than half of these are found on this continent. But few other plants in America, or in the world, inhabit such varied and such extended areas. In North America wild grapes abound on the warm, dry soils of New Brunswick and New England, about the Great Lakes in Canada and in the United States, and on the fertile river banks and in the valleys, rich woodlands and thickets of the eastern and southern States. They thrive in the dry woods, sandy sea-plains, and reef-keys of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida where the vines of the Scuppernong often run more than a hundred feet over trees and shrubs, rioting in natural luxuriance. They flourish in the mountains and limestone hills of the Virginias, Tennessee and Kentucky. They are not so common in the West, yet found in almost all parts of Missouri and Arkansas, and from North Dakota through Kansas to southern Texas. Some wild grape is found in each of the Rocky Mountain States on plain or mountain, or in river chasm or dry canon. Several species are found in New Mexico, Arizona and California, where if they did not furnish the Spanish _padres_ of Santa Fe and San Diego with fruit for wine, they suggested to them the planting of the first successful vineyards in the United States. How did the grape spread from the Carolinas to California and from subtropical Mexico to the barren plains of Central Canada? Why divide into its manifold forms in the distribution? These questions are of practical import to the grape-grower and breeder who seeks to improve this fruit. The knowledge of the distribution and evolution of plants obtained in the last half century is so complete that these questions present few difficulties to the naturalist of today. In answering them no one would now hold that the numerous species and their sub-divisions were created separately for the regions in which they grow. All would take the ground that the different wild forms come from one ancestral species. We can waive the question as to what the original species was and as to where it first grew. It is certain that grapes have not been distributed over North America by the hand of man. Probably they have been growing in the regions where they are now found since before the migration of the first savages. The agents of distribution have been natural ones, such as animals, birds, and lake and river currents. These have widened the area of a species to limits imposed by the hostile action of other plants and of animals and by geographical and physical conditions. As a species has encroached upon a new region, climate, soil, all of the conditions of environment, and the contest with other living things, have gradually modified its characters until in time it became so changed that it constituted a new species.