bore to other forms of property; thus he could devise his wigwam to his widow, and after her death to his favorite child. Again, a theft of maize was regarded as so heinous an act that it was punished with death, an evidence that separate ownership in this grain was strictly recognized when it had been gathered.[1] Furthermore, there is no record that after the annual harvest the crops were divided among the householders of the town. Being held for all practical purposes in separate tenure, the ground must have been cleared very largely by individual energy without special regard to the common interests, but this follows with certainty only in those cases in which the open fields were not spacious enough to furnish soil for the young warrior who had just established family relations of his own, or for those members of the tribe whose plats had given indications of exhaustion from prolonged cultivation. As a rule, the land originally selected was so extremely fertile that an increase in population alone led to the extension of a clearing.
The method employed by the Indians for the removal of the forest, in spite of its primitive character, is still followed in many parts of modern Virginia. It consists in running a girdle around the trunks of the largest trees, by cutting away the bark with a rude stone instrument, the object of this being to intercept the flow of the sap; and to make this still more effective, the aborigines were in the habit of kindling fires around the exposed roots, further destroying the vitality of the trees.[2] The trees exposed to this treatment lost all power of putting forth
