No. 151.] 363 



once, and select one in preference to the other if it contain but five 

 per cent more of saccharine matter. Two years since, I allowed a 

 favorite sow with her litter of pigs, which were about sixty days old, 

 to run in the orchard for a short time; she had not been there long, 

 when I observed the lower limbs of many trees stripped of their fruit, 

 as they were much too high for the sow to reach, she was of course, 

 not suspected. Enquiry was made but no one knew where the apples 

 had gone; as I had less to do than any of my men, I determined to 

 watch, and at length to my astonishment, discovered ,the sow standing 

 on her hind legs with a limb of the tree in her mouth, which she 

 shook most lustily, and the young ones made free with the fruit as it 

 fell. I saw her do this thing repeatedly. She was afterwards detect- 

 ed sucking one of my cows in the yard. This animal was four years 

 old, .and weighed, I should suppose, nearly four hundred pounds. 



The hog is very prolific. Vanbau made a calculation, showing that 

 in eleven years, a single sow, averaging each litter at six pigs, form- 

 ed ten generations, or 6,434,838 pigs. He further observes, that were 

 the calculations extended to the twelfth generation, the result would 

 be as great a number as all Europe could support, and extended to 

 the sixteenth generation, would outnumber the inhabitants on the 

 globe. 



ROBERT L. PELL. 



Pelham Farm, Ulster county) JV. F. 



