Professor George Husmann, the author of this Volume, is the recognized authority on grape growing and wine making in the United States. His reputation has likewise extended all over Europe. When grape growing met with its disastrous collapse twelve or fifteen years ago, a few bore up under the sad reverses and labored on, hoping for better times. Of this number was Professor Husmann, who had then become prominent in the culture of the grape in that district of which Hermann, Missouri, is the center. Though obliged to give up the vineyards he had established, and to relinquish the publication of the Grape Culturiist, a most excellent monthly journal, he still continued to prosecute his labors and investigations, which have been fitly recognized, among other ways, by his appointment as Professor of Horticulture in the Missouri State University. His first volume, published some years since, attracted wide attention. He now embodies in the present volume the results of all his labors and investigations down to the present time.<br />(Publisher 1880)