field, planted with the same grain, three hundred years afterwards by the modern Virginian farmer. There would be some difference in the height of many of the stalks on account of the rule which the Indians followed of planting their maize in relays, with a view of obtaining a continuous supply of roasting ears during the summer and early autumn, but in other particulars the aspect of the field, under the Indian and Virginian ownership respectively, would be substantially the same. There would be the same number of stalks to the hill,[1] with the vines of beans clambering up the stalks, peas running over the ground between the rows, and pumpkins, bulky and yellow, peeping through the mass of green leaves. The May-apple alone would be absent. John Taylor, of Caroline, in his treatise on Virginian Agriculture, takes occasion to indulge his sarcastic humor at the expense of the farmers of his day, by declaring that as late as the nineteenth century the cultivation of maize in his native State remained as it was borrowed from the aboriginal planters of America, except “that if product was the test of science, the latter must be allowed to have been more accomplished husbandmen than their imitators.” An accurate conception of the productiveness of an acre under Indian tillage is to be obtained from the statement of Hariot, that the average yield was, by London measure, two hundred bushels of maize, peas, beans, and pumpkins.[2]
In the late autumn, when the grain was ripe enough to
- ↑ It is highly probable that for many years the colonists followed the rule of the Indians in allowing an interval of four feet between the holes in which the seed corn was planted. Owing doubtless to the decline in the fertility of the soil, the interval had by the Eighteenth Century been extended to six feet. See Smyth’s Travels, 1773, Va. Hist. Register, vol. VI, No. II, p. 81; Ibid., No. III, p. 132.
- ↑ Hariot, p. 15.
