Страница 619 из 2651

343, 344.} The annual grasses were, it seems, the best natural

grasses in that part of North America; and when the Europeans

first settled there, they used to grow very thick, and to rise

three or four feet high. A piece of ground 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 of milk which that one was capable of

giving. The poorness of the pasture had, in his opinion,

occasioned the degradation of their cattle, which degenerated

sensibly from one generation to another. They were probably not

unlike that stunted breed which was common all over Scotland

thirty or forty years ago, and which is now so much mended

through the greater part of the low country, not so much by a

change of the breed, though that expedient has been employed in

some places, as by a more plentiful method of feeding them.