Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/263

 Yeardley seems, during the first year of his administration, to have given special attention to the cultivation of grain with a view to removing all prospect of a famine. To such an extent did he neglect the cultivation of tobacco during this period, that he thought it advisable to explain his motive to the Company in England, thus showing that its members had not determined to diminish very materially the amount of that commodity to be produced in the Colony. Yeardley appears to have been very successful with the wheat he sowed very soon after his arrival. It was reported in England that he had secured two harvests from the same field in the course of the same season, the second of which had sprung from seeds shaken to the earth by the wind as it passed over the heads of the preceding crop. After this second crop of wheat had been reaped, the ground was planted in Indian corn, from which there was an abundant yield in the autumn. It is quite certain, however, that the Indian corn had to be gathered before it had fully matured, there being hardly an interval of three months between the time when the second wheat harvest took place and the arrival of frost. It was said that the ground was of such extraordinary fertility, that the maize planted in it germinated and sprang up into stalks with great rapidity. The statement as to the second growth of wheat has its only satisfactory explanation in the fact that in the seventeenth century the process of cutting this grain was so prolonged, owing to the use of sickles and books, the only implements at this time employed, that a considerable part of a crop standing upon a field of some extent became overripe before the harvest was completed and fell to the ground. When a second crop was reaped from the same field in the