Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/158

 blinding and terrifying. The thunder and lightning of aboriginal Virginia are represented in all the earliest descriptions of the country to have been far more calculated to cause alarm than the same natural phenomena in England; it was supposed that this was due to the vast extent of the prim&aelig;val forests, for it was noticed that the violence of the storms diminished as the open lands of the plantations increased in area, but even in the latter portion of the seventeenth century, when the country had been in part under cultivation for eighty years, this violence was so frightful while it lasted, that the atmosphere was thought to be pervaded by a distinct odor of sulphur. The tempests of hail rose to the fury of tornadoes, and as the stones were sometimes eight or ten inches in compass, they often caused very great destruction both to vegetable and animal life. Excessive droughts in summer, which were generally broken by hail storms, were a common feature of the climate.

There was much diversity of opinion among the early colonists as to whether Virginia was a wholesome region from a hygienic point of view. The weight of the testimony transmitted would seem to show that the settlers upon their arrival, with few exceptions, suffered in health very severely from the sudden changes in the atmosphere, and that it was only after the body had been thoroughly