16 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



and healthy diet, are not the proper food for fat stuffs. The 

 confinement in barn cellars, darkness, close pens, filth, the 

 refuse of slaughter-houses, glue factories, and dirty manu- 

 factories, give a richness and dainty flavor to the articles of 

 human food known as bacon, ham, lard, sausages, salt pork, 

 head cheese, liver, and so on. The hog is the nest or 

 generating place of the trichina and the elegant tape-worm, 

 which ultimately take up their residence in the bodies of men 

 and women. He is also the source of lard, or the diseased 

 fat reduced to a soft solid and used extensively in cookery 

 to prepare the common but iunutritious piecrust. Lard is 

 also of constant use in the frying-pan — an American delight. 

 Its great value here is that it boils at so high a temperature 

 when food is cooked in it that the tender and juicy albumen is 

 dried up and greatly injured, but at the same time the delicate 

 flavor of the diseased fat is all the more brought forward. 



If, now, any one complains that this is no photograph, but 

 an artistic sketch and highly colored in some respects, it is 

 certainly safe to say that fully one-half the hogs in New Eng- 

 land are no better ofl' than in the character just given them. 



But the farmer says : " What shall I do ? It costs but little 

 to raise hogs ; they help greatly to work over manure, and 

 furnish food for my family for a large part of the year. I 

 can't afford to live unless I raise hogs." The answer to this 

 is somewhat radical, with present information on the subject, 

 but it points to an end which the laws of God compel us to con- 

 sider ; and this is, to use none of this "unclean " animal for food, 

 but in place of it use much more the natural ripe cooked and 

 uncooked fruits of the earth. Perhaps you must have one or 

 two hogs to use up certain kinds of refuse and to turn over 

 the excrements of the barn-yard. Very well, do it. But 

 make your pigpen at least three times the distance from the 

 top of your well of drinking water that it is from the top to 

 the bottom of the well. Then make or have a shed near by, 

 where a quantity of dry loam can be constantly kept, and 

 daily (daring summer and early autumn) let enough of this 

 loam be "cast before the swine" to absorb everything like 

 liquid or moist manure or filth. This, with an occasional 

 removal of all the contents of the jjigpen to the compost 

 heap, and you have the best antidote to one of the farmer's 



