This is the case wherever tobacco has been made the principal object of cultivation. It is not, however, so much owing to the great share of nutriment which the tobacco plant requires, that the land is impoverished, as to the particular mode of cultivating it, which renders it necessary for people to be continually walking between the plants from the moment they are set out, so that the ground about each plant is left exposed to the burning rays of the sun all the summer, and becomes at the end of the season a hard beaten pathway. A ruinous system has prevailed also of working the same piece of land year after year, till it was totally exhausted; after this it was left neglected, and a fresh piece of land was cleared, that always produced good crops for one or two seasons; but this in its turn was worn out and afterwards left waste. Many of the planters are at length beginning to see the absurdity of wearing out their lands in this manner, and now raise only one crop of tobacco upon a piece of new land, then they sow wheat for two years, and afterwards clover. They put on from twelve to fifteen hundred bushels of manure per acre at first, which is found to be sufficient both for the tobacco and wheat; the latter is produced at the rate of about twenty bushels per acre. In some parts of Virginia, the lands left waste in this manner throw up, in a very short time, a spontaneous growth of pines and cedars; in which case, being shaded from the powerful influence of the sun, they recover their former fertility at the end of fifteen or twenty years; but in other parts many years elapse before any verdure appears upon them. The trees springing up in this spontaneous manner usually grow very close to each other; they attain the height of fifteen or twenty feet, perhaps, in the same number of years; there is, however, but very little sap in them, and in a short time after they are cut down they decay. [Sidenote: TOBACCO PLANTATIONS.] Tobacco is raised and manufactured in the following manner: When the spring is so far advanced that every apprehension of the return of frost is banished, a convenient spot of ground is chosen, from twenty to one hundred feet square, whereon they burn prodigious piles of wood, in order to destroy the weeds and insects. The warm ashes are then dug in with the earth, and the seed, which is black, and remarkably small, sown. The whole is next covered over with bushes, to prevent birds and flies, if possible, from getting to it; but this, in general, proves very ineffectual; for the plant scarcely appears above ground, when it is attacked by a large black fly of the beetle kind, which destroys the leaves. Persons are repeatedly sent to pick off these flies; but sometimes, notwithstanding all their attention, so much mischief is done that very few plants are left alive. As I passed through Virginia, I heard universal complaints of the depredations they had committed; the beds were almost wholly destroyed.