624 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF 



S. Miiller, ' Verhand.' i. taf. 30, one has the tail curled, and the 

 other, the elder one, has it straight. 



Mr. BIyth (cit, Jerdon, I. c.) holds S. cristatus to be only a variety 

 of the wild boar of Europe, but still to be a well-marked race. De 

 Blainville (' Osteog. Sus,' p. 1 29) sees no differences of morphological 

 importance between any of the Asiatic swine and the European 

 wild boar, and says : — 



* La premibre espbce que le squelette nous permet de distinguer par des caractferes 

 susceptibles d'etre lus et expose;^ est celle qui se trouve dans toute I'Afrique au delk 

 de I'Atlas et jusqu'k son exfcr^mit^ la plus meridionale et meme au delk dans la 

 grande lie de Madagascar, et qui est connue sous le nom de Sus larvatus {PotamO' 

 choerus africanus, Porcus madagascariensis, nobis'). 



Giebel follows De Blainville in this. Dr. Gray, in ' Proc. Zool. 

 Soc' 1852, p. 130, said that, after examining ten skulls of the 

 European wild boar and its offspring from this country, from the 

 Gambia, and from the Cape, as also twelve skulls of the wild hog' 

 from Continental India, he could not discover any constant easily- 

 described character by which the European and the Indian kinds 

 could be distinguished. And, he adds, 'this is the case in the 

 many other genera allied to the pigs.' It is true, no doubt, that 

 many animals, such as — 



' the lion and the tiger, the fox and the jackal, the ass and the zebra, are far more 

 strikingly diflPerentiated by their pelage than by their skulls,' 



as Professor Huxley ('Prehistoric Remains of Caithness,' p. 132) 

 has taught us; still it yet remains to be proved that differences 

 which, though only skin-deep, are constant and permanent, will not 

 ultimately be found to be correlated with more or fewer differences 

 of the deeper-lying parts, either of a purely qualitative or of a 

 quantitative kind. 



In a disquisition the ultimate object of which is the attainment 

 of clearer views as to the origin of our tame pigs, the question 

 meets us at the outset whether there exists any marked difference 

 between the wild stocks under comparison as regards their suscep- 

 tibility of domestication. Upon this point I have to say that I 

 find, in opposition to what Mr. Samuel Sidney has laid down in the 

 first chapter of his work on the pig, that S?is scrofa^ \2ix.ferus, is 

 credited by most trustworthy authors with as great a capacity for 

 domestication as any wild animal, including its wild Asiatic 

 congeners, upon which observations are recorded as to this particular 



