ty-three years, was recently
destroyed by the fire which consumed the college. Sir John Randolph was
succeeded in the office of treasurer by John Robinson, Jr.

From the preamble to the act for the better preservation of deer, it
appears that in the upper country they were so numerous that they were
killed (as buffalo often are in the far West) for their skins. They were
shot while feeding on the moss growing on the rocks in the rivers; and
their carcases attracted wolves and other wild beasts to the destruction
of cattle, hogs, and sheep. Many deer were also killed by hounds running
at large, and by fire-hunting, that is, by setting on fire, in large
circles, the coverts where the deer lodged, which likewise destroyed the
young timber, and the food for cattle.

From the settlement of Jamestown a century elapsed before Virginia began
to extend her settlements to the foot of the Blue Ridge. Governor
Spotswood (1716) explored those mountains beyond the head-springs of the
confluents of the Rappahannock. After a good many years, Joist Hite, of
Pennsylvania, obtained from the original patentees a warrant for forty
thousand acres of land lying among the beautiful prairies at the
northern or lower end of the valley of the Shenandoah. Hite, with his
own and a number of other families, removed (1632) from Pennsylvania,
and seated themselves on the banks of the Opeckon, a few miles south of
the site of Winchester. This handful of settlers could venture more
securely into this remote country, as coming from Pennsylvania, a
province endeared to the Indians by the gentle and humane policy of
its first founder, William Penn. Toward the Virginians--the "Long
Knives"--the Indians bore an implacable hostility, and warmly opposed
their settling in the valley.[426:A]

In her physical geography Virginia is divided into four sections:
the first, the alluvial section, from the sea-coast to the head of
tide-water; the second, the hilly, or undulating section, from the head
of tide-water to the Blue Ridge; the third, the valley section, lying
between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies; and the fourth, the
Trans-Alleghany or western section, the waters of which empty into the
Ohio. The mountains of Virginia are arranged in ridges, one behind
another, nearly parallel to the sea-coast, rather bending toward it to
the northeast. The name Apalachian, borrowed from the country bordering
on the Gulf of Mexico to the southwest, was applied to the m