262 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



trouble with the bowels of either my calves or pigvS. But I 

 found that by allowing my hogs to run upon the manure 1 

 did not get satisfactory results. As Mr. Ware has stated, 

 in the cold weather they would bury themselves in the 

 manure, and in the warmer weather they would get very 

 dirty. I did not find, as some gentlemen have said, that 

 they would return to their pens where they had nice clean 

 beds of straw, particularly in cold weather. If it was cold 

 they would bury themselves in this manure and lie there the 

 whole time. Of late years I have entirely shut my hogs off 

 from the manure and I get better results. My pigs are 

 clean and they are more healthy. 



Mr. Grinnell. I have bred thirty or forty pigs a year, 

 kept them until they weighed from two hundred to two hun- 

 dred and fifty pounds, and then sold them to Mr. Smith, Mr. 

 Burnett's agent, and, as he says, he gets the best pigs that 

 he buys from our section. He sends down from twenty to 

 thirty car-loads a season. 



What I want to speak, about is a little foreign to what has 

 been said. There has been very little said about the diseases 

 of the hog. It is proper that something should be said on 

 that subject. 



Rheumatism is not an uncommon thing among hogs, and 

 it is rheumatism, probably, that affected those hogs, — kept 

 in wet, damp and illy ventilated places. I have had rheuma- 

 tism in hogs in certainly two instances where they were kept 

 in quite dry pens, but I have always had them cured by rub- 

 bing. But I want more particularly to say, and I say it with 

 i\ good deal of positiveness, that in our part of the State we 

 have not had a single case of hog cholera. I do not believe 

 there has been a case of hog cholera in this Commonwealth 

 that did not come from the Boston and Albany Railroad, 

 directly or indirectly, with one exception, where a car on 

 the Fitchburg Railroad broke down and caused the famous 

 Hawkes case of damao;es a^-ainst the State railroad, of which 

 you have heard. All the other cases of hog cholera you 

 will find traceable to such points as Pittsfield, Westfield, 

 Springfield and the like, where the Boston and Albany Rail- 

 road have brought whole car-loads direct from the West. 

 The disease by which we have lost a good many pigs in our 



