_Shrubs with watery juice, usually climbing by tendrils, with small regular flowers, a minute or truncated calyx, its limb mostly obsolete, and the stamens as many as the valvate petals and opposite them! Berry 2-celled, usually 4-seeded._--Petals 4--5, very deciduous, hypogynous or perigynous. Filaments slender; anthers introrse. Pistil with a short style or none, and a slightly 2-lobed stigma; ovary 2-celled, with 2 erect anatropous ovules from the base of each cell. Seeds bony, with a minute embryo at the base of the hard albumen, which is grooved on one side.--Stipules deciduous. Leaves alternate, palmately veined or compound; tendrils and flower-clusters opposite the leaves. Flowers small, greenish, commonly polygamous. (Young shoots, foliage, etc., acid.) [*] Ovary surrounded by a nectariferous or glanduliferous disk; plants climbing by the coiling of naked-tipped tendrils. 1. Vitis. Corolla caducous without expanding. Hypogynous glands 5, alternate with the stamens. Fruit pulpy. Leaves simple. 2. Cissus. Corolla expanding. Disk cupular. Berry with scanty pulp, inedible. Leaves simple or pinnately compound. [*][*] No distinct hypogynous disk; plants climbing by the adhesion of the dilated tips of the tendril-branches. 3. Ampelopsis. Corolla expanding. Leaves digitate. 1. VÌTIS, Tourn. GRAPE. Flowers polygamo-diœcious (some plants with perfect flowers, others staminate with at most a rudimentary ovary), 5-merous. Calyx very short, usually with a nearly entire border or none at all. Petals separating only at base and falling off without expanding. Hypogynous disk of 5 nectariferous glands alternate with the stamens. Berry pulpy. Seeds pyriform, with beak-like base.--Plants climbing by the coiling of naked-tipped tendrils. Flowers in a compound thyrse, very fragrant; pedicels mostly umbellate-clustered. Leaves simple, rounded and heart-shaped. (The classical Latin name.) § 1. VITIS proper. _Bark loose and shreddy; tendrils forked; nodes solid._ [+] _A tendril (or inflorescence) opposite each leaf._ 1. V. Labrúsca, L. (NORTHERN FOX-GRAPE.) Branchlets and young leaves very woolly; leaves large, entire or deeply lobed, slightly dentate, continuing rusty-woolly beneath; fertile panicles compact; berries large.--Moist thickets, N. Eng. to the Alleghany Mountains, and south to S. Car. June. Fruit ripe in Sept. or Oct., dark purple or amber-color, with a tough musky pulp. Improved by cultivation, it has given rise to the Isabella, Catawba, Concord and other varieties. [+][+] _Tendrils intermittent (none opposite each third leaf)._ [++] _Leaves pubescent and floccose, especially beneath and when young._