THE SWINE— WART HOGS. 



547 



tion. The natives are said to kill it with spears and 

 sometimes to organize hunts in which the animal 

 is driven by beaters, under which circumstances it 

 usually seeks safety in flight. 



The sow is said to give birth to one or two young, 

 in February. They are pretty little creatures, from 

 seven to eight inches in length, and are loved and 

 defended by their mother with great devotion. If 

 the young are taken early, they gradually acquire a 

 certain degree of tameness; they become used to 

 Man, occasionally follow their keepers about and 

 express their gratitude by shaking their ears and 

 tails. One sometimes finds a living Babirusa in the 

 possession of a native chief, for the people of the 

 islands which it inhabits regard it in the light of a 

 queer creature and keep it in confinement as a curi- 

 osity. This, however, happens quite seldom, and a 

 high price is asked for a Hog of this kind. 



the London Zoological Garden, and some of them 

 throve quite well, and propagated in captivity, under 

 the careful treatment accorded to them. 



THE WART HOGS. 



Besides the Humped Hogs (Potamocluvrus), Africa 

 harbors genuine monsters of the same family, the 

 Wart Hogs {Phacochcerus). They are the clumsiest 

 and ugliest of all known Swine, distinguished above 

 all by the ungainliness of their heads and the pecul- 

 iarity of their dentition. The body is of cylindrical 

 shape, the neck short, the head bulky, with a low, 

 broad forehead, the nasal area being perceptibly 

 broadened all over and disproportionately so in the 

 front part of the upper lip. On the sides the head 

 is disfigured by three wart-like growths; one of these 

 is over an inch high, pointed and mobile and is situ- 

 ated below the eye; another, a smaller one, stands 



Markus, the Dutch governor of the Moluccas, 

 made a present of a couple of Babirusas to the 

 French naturalists, Quoy and Gaimard, when they 

 visited him on their tour around the world. These 

 two Babirusas were the first that were brought 

 to Europe alive, arriving in 1820. Both animals 

 became tolerably tame. They proved to be ex- 

 tremely sensitive to cold. In March the female 

 gave birth to a young one and immediately became 

 very irritable and vicious. She allowed nobody to 

 touch her offspring, tore the clothes of the keepers 

 and snapped violently at those who approached her. 

 Unfortunately the animals did not long survive, for 

 the cold climate proved fatal to them. The little 

 Pig, a male, grew rapidly and attained to a consid- 

 able size in a few weeks. It died before it was 

 two years old. Later, other living Babirusas reached 



of the lower jaw are 



erect on the fore part of the side of the upper jaw, 

 and the third, which is long at the root, begins on 

 the lower jaw and extends along it to the mouth. 

 The small eyes are prominent, like those of the 

 Hippopotamus; the disk on the snout is enlarged 

 and is of an ovoid shape, the longest diameter being 

 horizontal. The skin is covered with very short and 

 thinly set bristles, with the exception of whiskers 

 and a spinal mane-like crest. The dentition con- 

 sists originally of six incisors above and below, 

 gigantic, longitudinally furrowed tusks, which bend 

 directly upward, as they do with the Hogs, and six 

 molars in each row, above and below. Thus there 

 are forty teeth, of which, however, not only the mo- 

 lars, but also a majority of the incisors, usually drop 

 out, although the loss of the teeth is not uniform 

 but varies in different individuals. 



