THE WEALTH 0I-' NATION'S.

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lie gives an account of the husbandry of some of the Englishcolonies in North America , as he found it in 1749, observes,accordingly, that he can with difficulty discover there thecharacter of the English nation, so well skilled in all the dif-ferent branches of agriculture. They make scarce any ma-nure for their corn-fields, he says; but when one piece ofground has been exhausted by continually cropping, theyclear and cultivate another piece of fresh land; and whenthat is exhausted, proceed to a third. Their cattle are al-lowed to wander through the woods and other uncultivatedgrounds, where they are half starved; having long ago extir-pated almost all the annual grasses by cropping them tooearly in the spring, before they had time to form their flowers,or to shed their seeds.* The annual grasses were, it seems,the best natural grasses in that part of North America ; andwhen the Europeans first settled there, they used to growvery thick, and to rise three or four feet high. A piece ofground which, when he wrote, could not maintain one cow,would in former times, he was assured, have maintained four,each of which would have given four times the quantity ofmilk which that one was capable of giving. The poornessof the pasture had, in his opinion, occasioned the degradationof their cattle, which degenerated sensibly from one genera-tion to another. They were probably not unlike that stuntedbreed which was common all over Scotland thirty or fortyyears ago, and which is now so much mended through thegreater part of the low country, not so much by a change ofthe breed, though that expedient has been employed in someplaces, as by a more plentiful method of feeding them.

Though it is late, therefore, in the progress of improvementbefore cattle can bring such a price as to render it profitableto cultivate land for the sake of feeding them ; yet of all thedifferent parts which compose this second sort of rude pro-duce, they are perhaps the first which bring this price; be-cause till they bring it, it seems impossible that improvementcan be brought near even to that degree ol perfection towhich it has arrived in many parts of Europe .

As cattle are among the first, so perhaps venison is amongthe last parts of this sort of rude produce which bring thisprice. The price of venison in Great Britain, how extrava-gant soever it may appear, is not near sufficient to compen-sate the expense of a deer park, as is well known to all those

* Kalm’a Travels, vol. i. p.343, .144.

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