28 AGRICULTURE. 



an animal of great activity and spirit. Man, in the due 

 exercise of the power which has been conferred upon him 

 of moulding nature to his own convenience, has made him 

 a creature of flitches and hams. We think, however, that, 

 in the case of the pig, the transforming power has been 

 exercised rather wantonly. Of all the overloaded animals 

 which deform our cattle-shows, none so entirely outrages 

 delicacy as the improved pig. Unless his legs shrink under 

 the weight of his shapeless carcass ; unless his belly trails 

 on the ground ; and unless his eyes are quite closed up by 

 fat, he has no chance of a prize. The extremes of domestic 

 swine are Prince Albert's prize pig at the one end, and the 

 pig whose domestic hearth is in the hut of the Finn, all 

 the way from St. Petersburgh to Archangel, at the other. 

 This latter is an animal of skin and bone. From his looks 

 you would not suppose that he has any vitals ; there seems 

 to be no room for them. His bristles, if not his ornament, 

 are at least his distinction. He furnishes them to our 

 markets to an extent both in quantity and value which, but 

 for custom-house statistics, would be thought fabulous, and 

 to which we only reconcile our judgment by recollecting 

 that he appears, by these his representatives, on the toilet- 

 table of every lady, we might almost say of every female, 

 in Great Britain. As to flesh, if one could conceive such 

 an animal to be ever subject to the tender passion, the 

 epithalamium with which Person honoured the union of the 

 lean master of Benet with a leaner bride would be highly 

 applicable to him : 



" Though you could not, like Adam, have gallantly said, 

 * Thou art flesh of my flesh,' for flesh ye had none, 

 You at least might have said, ' Thou art bone of my bone.'" 



Such are the extremes. " Media tutissimus ibis." 



But in swinecraft we are pigmies when compared with 

 the ancients. Ulysses, at one swine-station in Ithaca (and 

 we are told that he had others on the mainland), which 

 was under the care of Eumseus, had 600 breeding sows. 

 They were lodged in twelve stately chambers (fifty in a 



