A HUNDRED YEARS' PROGRESS. 277 



com, uuless it be some of tbem that liave a little wheat- straw, ueitlier 

 do tliey give tliem auy more of these than will serve to keep them alive ; 

 by reason whereof they venture into the marshy grounds and swamps 

 for food, where very many are lost." And Clayton, another contempo- 

 rary authority, says that "^'^ they neither housed nor milked their cows 

 in winter, having a notion tliat it would Mil themP A still later Swedish 

 traveler, Kahn, m speaking of the James Eiver colony, in 1749, says : 



They make scarce any manure for their corn-fields, but when one piece of ground has 

 been exhausted by continual cropping they clear .and cultivate another piece of fresh 

 land, and when that is exhausted proceed to a third. Their cattle are allowed to 

 wander through the woods and uncultivated grounds, where they are half starved, 

 having long ago extirpated all the annual grasses by cropping them too early in the 

 spring, before they had time to form their flowers or to shed their seeds. 



This statement will apply with nearly equal force to the other colo- 

 nies at that date. That the description is strictly correct, I may quote 

 from a distinguished Virginian, the Hon. James M. Garnett, who, in 

 1842, said : 



Frevious to our revolutionary war, as I h.ave been told by the farmers of that day, 

 no attempts worth mentioning were made to collect manure for general i>urposes, all 

 that was deemed needful being saved for the gardens and tobacco-lots, by summer cow- 

 pens. These were filled with cattle such as our modem breeders would hardly recog- 

 nize as belonging to the bovine species. In those days they were so utterly neglected 

 that it was quite common for the multitudes starved to death every winter to supply 

 hides enough for shoeing the negroes on every farm. This was a matter so generally 

 and constantly anticipated, that my own grandfather, as I have heard from unques- 

 tionable authority, was once very near tiirning oft" a good overseer because cattle enough 

 had not died on the farm of which he had the supervision to furnish leather for the 

 above purpose. When any cattle were fattened for beef, almost the only process was 

 to turn them into the corn-fields to feed themselves. Sheep and hogs were equally 

 neglected. 



In order to realize still more fully the condition of the early settlers, 

 so far as the treatment of stock is concerned, we are to consider that no 

 attention was paid to the culture of the grasses, even in England, in 

 the early part of the seventeenth century, and that very few of the 

 roots now extensively cultivated and used as food for stock had been 

 introduced there. The introduction of red clover into England did not 

 take place till 1633 ; that of sainfoin, not till 1G51 ; that of yellow clover, 

 not till 1659 ; that of the white or Dutch clover, not till 1700. Of the 

 natural grasses, our well-known timothy was tirst brought into cultiva- 

 tion in this country, and it was not cultivated in England until the year 

 1760. The culture of orchard-grass was first introduced into England 

 from Virginia in 1764. There is no evidence of any systematic or arti- 

 ficial cultivation of grasses there until the introduction of the perennial 

 rye-grass in 1677, and no other variety of grass-seed appears to have 

 been sown for many years, not, indeed, till toward the close of the last 

 century, upon the introduction of timothy and orchard-grass. The 

 Edinburgh Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, the highest authority in 

 such matters, says the practice of sowing grass-seed was never known 

 in Scotland previous to the year 1792. Such being the case, in a climate 

 so severe as that of Scotland, it is not at all surprising that the custom 

 in this country dates back only about a hundred years. 



It is a somewhat curious fact that the moderii improvement in cattle 

 in England did not begin till after the systematic culture of the higher 

 qualities of natural grass. It is not strange, therefore, that the colo- 

 nists here, who had vastly greater hardships to encounter in the prac- 

 tical operations of the farm, were slow to recognize the possibilities ot 

 improvement, or that their cattle, poor as they must have been at the 

 outset, continued rather to depreciate than to improve in quality until 



