Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/151

 with some simplicity, ascribed this fecundity to a peculiar variety of grass upon which they fed, and he states that the same fecundity was remarked in the goats imported from England, the increase in the generative power of the females being very notable, this being gravely attributed by him to the same influence. Many elks were also seen.

There are allusions in the early descriptions of Virginia which would seem to show that the buffalo ranged at one time to the east of the mountains. Kine, one writer asserts, had been found in great herds on some of the tributaries of the Chesapeake. A hundred years later they were observed in the meadows of the modern Dan by Colonel William Byrd. Their paths were deeply worn in the soil of the Shenandoah valley when that beautiful country was first thrown open to English settlement, but they had probably entirely disappeared from the lower peninsulas of Virginia long before the arrival of the colonists, having been driven out by the Indian hunters. The wolves of aboriginal Virginia were not much larger than the English fox, but so ravenous that it was difficult for the traveller who had encamped in the woods for the night to prevent his horse from being devoured, although tethered close to his side, and in the light of the fire. Eight decades after the first settlement of the country, Clayton, who was in Virginia at