ment to him not only to urge forward the laborers under his supervision, but also to extend the area of new grounds, because it was from the virgin soil that he was able to obtain the most abundant crops of tobacco. It was always to his interest that the fields which had been under cultivation for several years should be abandoned as soon as they gave the first indication of exhaustion. As his only object was to extract as much from the land as it would give forth in its natural condition, there was nothing to create in him the desire to preserve its original fertility, either by following careful methods of tillage or by application of such manures as were in his reach. In the seventeenth century this was not so great a source of damage to the material welfare of Virginia as in the eighteenth and in the first quarter of the nineteenth, for the same system of remunerating the overseer continued to prevail down to as late a period as 1825. There was such a vast extent of uncleared land even in the most ancient counties of the Colony in the seventeenth century, that the extermination of the forest was the most important economic act which the inhabitants were called upon to perform. The motives prompting the overseer to display extraordinary energy in removing the woods did not, therefore, result in very great harm, except in the communities which were thickly populated, and where agricultural conditions prevailed similar to those found in Virginia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The estates in these communities demanded a careful system of tillage, but the same reckless waste appeared in their management as in that of the frontier plantations; the soil which had been under cultivation was left unimproved, and reliance was placed on the woodland to furnish the new grounds considered to be indispensable.
No step of importance seems to have been taken in the
