SWINE IN IRELAND. 89 



ble. The pure Chinese hog is too delicate and susceptible of cold 

 ever to become a really profitable animal in this country ; it is dif- 

 ficult to rear, and the sows are not good nurses ; but one or two 

 judicious crosses have in a manner naturalized it. 



This breed will fatten readily, and on a comparatively small quan- 

 tity of food ; and the flesh is exceedingly delicate, but does not 

 make good bacon, and is often too fat and oily to be generally 

 esteemed as pork. They are chiefly kept by those who rear suck- 

 ing-pigs for the market, as they make excellent roasters at three 

 weeks or a month old. Some authors point out five, some seven 

 varieties of the Chinese breed, but these are doubtless the results of 

 different crosses with our native kinds ; among these are black, 

 white, black and white, spotted, and blue and white, or sandy. Many 

 valuable crosses have been made with these animals ; for the preva- 

 lent fault of the old English breeds having been coarseness of flesh, 

 unwieldiness of form, and want of aptitude to fatten, an admixture 

 of the Chinese breed has materially corrected these defects. Most 

 of our smaller breeds are more or less indebted to the Asiatic swine 

 for their present compactness of form, the readiness with which they 

 fatten on a small quantity of food, and their early maturity ; but 

 these advantages are not considered by some persons as sufficiently 

 great to compensate for the diminution in size, the increased deli- 

 cacy of the animals, and the decrease of number in the litters. The 

 best cross is between the Berkshire and the Chinese, 

 mmm 



IRELAND. 



Here the hog is, in the fullest sense of the word, a domesticated ani- 

 mal. The Irish pig is born in the warmest nook of his master's cabin, 

 reared among the children, and often far better fed and more care- 

 fully tended than the ragged urchins who play around him, for the 

 peasant will half starve himself and children in order to have more 

 food for his pig ; and while the former have only potatoes, and few 

 enough of them, the porker frequently gets not only a good meal 

 of potatoes, but some porridge, or bran, or refuse vegetables in ad- 

 dition. He isi in fact the chief person in the household ; on him the 

 poor man reckons for the payment of his rent or the purchase of the 

 necessaries of life. Swine abound in all parts of Ireland ; scarcely 

 a peasant's cot but numbers a pig among the family ; and the roads, 

 lanes, and fields in the neighborhood of every village, and the 

 suburbs of every large town, are infested with a grunting multitude. 



Until lately, however, notwithstanding the value set on these ani- 

 mals, the real Irish pig was a huge, gaunt, long-legged, slab-sided, 

 roach-backed, coarse-boned, grisly brute ; with large flapping eara 

 which almost wholly shrouded the face ; of a dirty white, or black 

 and white color with harsh coarse hair, and bristles that almost 



