Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/103

 above the waves of the ocean. Under the influence of a mild climate and the moisture of the sea, this soil is prolific in many forms of vegetable life, but soon loses its fertility. In the present age, there are to be observed in every part of Tidewater Virginia what are known as first and second alluvial bottoms. The first are composed of a diversity of materials deposited by the rivers; the second, which are considered to be more valuable, consist of several varieties of loam, with a substratum of dark red or yellow clay, this soil being stiffer and drier than that of the first alluvial bottoms, and occasionally sandy. The land rises from these second alluvial bottoms in the character of extensive slopes, which, when exhausted by careless cultivation, are inclined to wash, the washing exposing a sterile earth at the depth of three or four inches. The ridges succeeding the slopes are composed of a stiff and sandy soil, that is always poor in quality.

It is interesting to compare this condition of the soils of Tidewater Virginia in the nineteenth century with the earliest account of a general nature which we have of its soils in the seventeenth. When Beverley wrote his well-known history of the Colony, the English had been in possession of the land for nearly one hundred years, and much of its early fertility had been destroyed by the indifferent system of tillage prevailing in that age; substantially, however, the face of the country must have remained in the same state as that in which it was originally found. According to Beverley, the soils of Virginia were capable of being divided under three heads from the different characteristics which they presented. First, there was the soil in the vicinity of the mouths of the principal streams, which was composed of a moist and