-:,- CASSELL'S POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY. 



notorious miller's, " bone and skin." He seems to have no room for any vitals. His bristles, however, 

 if not his ornament, are at least his distinction ; and, strange t<> say, he supplies them in an abundance 

 which, but for Custom-house statistics, would be thought fabulous. 



Then, in our cattle-shows, no overloaded animal so entirely outrages delicacy as tin 1 improved pig. 

 Unless his legs shrink under the weight of his shapeless carcase, unless his belly trails on the ground, 

 and unless his eyes are closed up by fat, he has no chance of a prize ! Sir Francis Head has shrewdly 

 remarked, "There is, perhaps, in creation no animal which has less justice ami more injustice done 

 to him by man than the pig. Gifted with every faculty for supplying himself, and providing against 

 the approaching storm, which no creature is better capable of foretelling than the pig, we begin by 

 [Hitting an iron ring through the cartilage of the nose, and, having thus barbarously deprived him of 

 the power of searching for and analysing his food, we generally condemn him for the rest of his life to 



CHINESE PIGS. 



solitary confinement in a stye. While his faculties are still his own, only observe how, with a bark or 

 snort, he starts if you approach him, and mark what shrewd intelligence there is in his bright, twinkling 

 little eye; but with pigs, as with mankind, idleness is the root of all evil. The poor animal, finding 

 that he has absolutely nothing to do having no enjoyment nothing to look forward to but the pail 

 which feeds him, naturally most eagerly, or, as we accuse him, most greedily meets its arrival. Having 

 no natural business or diversion nothing to occupy his brain the whole powers of his system are 

 directed to the digestion of a superabundance of food. To encourage this, nature assists him with 

 sleep, which, lulling his better faculties, leads his stomach to become the ruling power of his system, 

 a tyrant that can bear no one's presence but his own. The poor pig, thus treated, gorges himself 

 sleeps eats again sleeps awakens in a fright screams struggles against the blue apron screams 

 fainter and fainter turns up the whites of his little eyes and dies. It is probably from abhorring 

 this picture that I know of nothing which is more distressing to me than to witness an indolent man 

 eating his own home-fed pork. There is something so horribly similar between the life of the human 

 and that of his victim their motions on all occasions are so unnaturally contracted there is 

 a melancholy resemblance between the strutting residence in the village, and the stalking confine- 

 ment of the stye between the sound of the dinner-bell and the rattling of the pail that when I 



