396 LECTURE XIII. 



before tlie historical period, but tbat it agrees in its characters 

 so much with the middle tertiary hog, that this race may have 

 descended from it. As the hogs from the caves and the allu- 

 vial formations agree so greatly with the wild hog, the latter 

 and better armed type, which appeared later, would have sup- 

 planted the older and weaker race, had not man taken it under 

 his protection, and so preserved it to this day. There is even 

 now bred in Graublinden, Uri, and Wallis a small, round- 

 backed, short-legged race, with short erect ears, short thick 

 snout, long bristles, and of uniformly black or reddish brown 

 colour, the osseous and dental structure of which agrees with 

 that of the marsh-hog. It is therefore highly probable that 

 this race is descended from the extinct wild marsh-hog, and 

 that by domestication it acquired a more sloping forehead, a 

 shorter occiput, and less curved zygomatic arches. The Indian 

 or the Siam hog, which in Asia is not found in a wild state, 

 but is a widely-spread domestic animal is said to approximate 

 most nearly the tamed marsh-hog. Still the material for com- 

 parison (a drawing of a skull by Daubenton) placed at the 

 disposal of Riitimeyer, is so scanty that nothing certain can 

 be inferred. The wild hog was undoubtedly the ancestor of 

 most central-European large-eared domestic swine. During 

 the stone-period it was in a wild state ; it is only in Concise, 

 the Neufchatel lake, where, as already stated, the civihsa- 

 tion of the stone-age was at its acme, that relics of the domes- 

 tication of the wild hog were found. " I must confess," says 

 Riitimeyer, " that the scanty traces of the tamed wild hog, by 

 the side of the abundant relics of the tamed marsh-hog, seem 

 rather in favour of the introduction of a new race into Concise, 

 than in favour of the domestication of the wild hog by the 

 lake dwellers, the more so as at Concise traces of the cow 

 belonging to the trochoceros race appear, which are absent in 

 the earlier pile-works." 



Be this as it may, the domestication of the common wild 

 hog, which inhabits Europe and the shores of the Mediterra- 

 nean, is not derived from Asia, where other wild hog races 

 exist, but originated in Europe — possibly, as we shall pre- 

 sently see, in the regions of the Mediterranean. We have 

 here a repetition of the phenomena in the canine race, namely. 



