As proven this year of 1874, the following grapes are worth attention:

Croton

This grape in the Cayuga Lake Valley is healthy, hardy and prolific. Has a longish, loose bunch, with large berries, and also smaller ones. Bunch, six to seven inches long, and three to four broad. Golden yellow, with thin, white bloom. It ripens slowly, and hence those eating it early, and partially ripened, will be apt to condemn, it as sweet but flavorless. Fully ripe when Concords are also fully mature; it is juicy like the foreign sweet water; sweet, and with a low grade of aroma, but what aroma it has is pleasant. It will not do to eat it with other and higher flavored grapes, as they make it seem insipid. But fully ripe, and eaten alone, it will, I think, be considered valuable, and be sought after. Like all white grapes, both European and native, it is apt to have a few berries rot and slink away in nearly all its bunches, but not to much extent.

Waiter

Grown on Concord and Isabella roots. This is a grape large in berry and bunch. I must class it with high flavored grapes - it having at this place a strong honey-sweet aroma, that lasts long on the taste nerves of the mouth. This flavor is so strong as to destroy the aroma of less decided flavors. Hence it can be eaten alone, by itself, or with others. The grape on its own roots is less vigorous, and with less aroma. It is healthy and hardy here. The Ithaca.- This is my own seedling, This grape ripens before Delaware and Concord, still proves hardy, healthy and vigorous. It is in bunch and berry larger than Walter; a pure greenish yellow, with a rose-like smell, and a high Chasselas Masquelike flavor, similar to, but not as high as its partial parent, it being a cross of Chasselas on Delaware. A few berries rotted this year; not many. The fruit by the quantity looks well, both in baskets and when it is packed in boxes. Sold for thirty cents a pound against Delaware and other grapes at ten cents.

A cold August was against it this year, yet it was the second in earliness and the best in quality of all grapes here.

Wyoming Bed

This grape which I have so long entreated the public to enquire for and plant, has at last become one sought after, and it is being rapidly diffused, so much so, that the few thousands propagated here, yearly, cannot supply the demand. Its great value is, that it is hardy, prolific, and ripens in advance of all other grapes, and hence sells well. The whole crop here, sold at twenty cents or more, and did not supply the local demand for it. It is not the best in quality, as it is a Fox grape, but is a good grape; red, about the size and appearance of Walter; not as choice in flavor, but sweet and agreeable.

Nathan C. Ely

This is a seedling of David Thompson, of Green Island, near Troy, N. Y. Unexpectedly to me its bunch proved remarkably large, so much so, as to take us all by surprise. Bunches, nine inches long by five wide, were very common. Several were a foot long and eight inches through the shoulder. The berry is medium-large in size, yellowish-green, very closely set in its crowded bunch. It appears in shape and form like an European grape, just as if it had been grown under glass. It is probably three-fourths foreign pollen. It resembles no foreign grape I have any knowledge of, though I am familiar with most of the usual and some rare kinds as grown under glass. At Ithaca we have in this vine, that on a common vineyard trellis, totally unprotected in the open out-door air, ripens its fruit, a magnificent bunch and a fine appearing berry, with perfectly healthy foliage and ripened wood. Yet it is a matter of regret that it is late, coming to maturity after Concord, ripening just before Isabella. Vines load themselves with these splendid clusters.

I also regret that it is less sweet and less in aroma than Croton. Indeed it is deficient in sugar and flavor.

Farmers Club

This is another of David Thompson's grapes, less in size of bunch than the N. C. Ely. The vines on the grounds of Mr. Tucker of this place, are not yet old enough to say exactly what this will prove to be, yet its flavor is better than the N. C. Ely, berry is greener and more even in their size.

Most of David Thompson's black seedlings are late, and appear like enlarged Isabellas, as far as I have proven or seen them here; thus the Ketchum, S. J. Parker and others are but feebly to be commended, so far as proven. The Carpenter is a large, red grape, cannot be grown here unless the vine is taken down off the trellis and covered with earth each winter, a thing we do not do in proving new seedlings - it being my rule to let all vines sent me for proving die, unless they can endure the Ithaca climate, tied on the open air trellis in exposed situations. The Carpenter dies to the surface of the ground every year.

A gentleman whose name I have forgotten, about forty miles north of Pascagola, Miss., several years ago, sent me by mail a vine, saying it is an early white grape, very sweet, and I wish you to try it. Having no confidence in it, I paid but little attention to it. This year it was loaded with not a white, but a red grape, which in flavor and appearance is very similar to, but far better than the Sugar grape of the Shakers, of New Lebanon, near Albany, N. Y., on the stage road to Pittsfield, Mass. The Shaker grape I condemn. This I can commend as a "Sugar grape/' very sweet, singular in the "Shaker" flavor, prolific in bearing, with a cleft leaf also similar to the Shaker. Its larger bunch and berry, its sweetness and hardiness at the north are its principal features after its very peculiar flavor. It falls like Hartford from the stem. It is also a Fox grape.

Such are a few grapes out of the many proven, and which may interest the readers of The Horticulturist. I have tried to speak impartially and truly of them as they appear to me, this season, until the October rains gave us very fine grapes.