THE PIG AND HIPPOPOTAMUS 275 
Photo by Ottomar Fea, i = (Berlin 
WILD BOAR 
In its long, bristly hair and powerful lower tusks, the wild boar is a very different animal from its domesticated descendants 
the same standard. Thus the large-bodied, long-eared English breed, with a convex back, and 
the small-bodied, short-eared Chinese breeds, with a concave back, when bred to the same 
state of perfection, nearly resemble each other in the form of the head and body. This 
result, it appears, is partly due to similar causes of change acting on the several races, and 
partly to man breeding the pig for one sole purpose — namely, for the greatest amount of 
flesh and fat; so that selection has always tended towards one and the same end. With 
most domestic animals the result of selection has been divergence of character; here it has 
been convergence.” 
THE TRUE PIGs 
True pigs are found only in the Old World, and even there in very widely different forms. 
Typical of these quadrupeds is the well-known WILD Boar, found abundantly in many parts 
of Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, and Central Asia. In the British Islands the wild boar 
must once have been extraordinarily plentiful, especially in Ireland, where its tame descendants 
still so greatly flourish. In the days of the Plantagenets wild swine fed and sheltered in the 
woodlands close to London. James I. hunted them near Windsor in 1617, and even down to 
the year 1683 these animals still had their haunts in the more secluded parts of England. 
Although now extinct in these Islands, the wild boar is to be found plentifully at the present 
day in France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Spain, Greece, Albania, and other countries of the 
Mediterranean. In most parts of Europe the wild boar is shot during forest drives, but in 
the Caucasus and round the Black Sea the hardy peasants lie in wait for these animals by the 
fruit-trees on autumn nights or waylay them going to the water and shoot them single-handed. 
Many an old Cossack, writes Mr. Clive Phillipps-Wolley, bears the scars of some desperate 
encounter with these formidable foes. In Spain, where in the old days the boar was pursued by 
cavaliers with spear and pike, it is still, in the forests of Estremadura, followed with horse and 
hound, usually, says Mr. Abel Chapman, “ during the stillness of a moonlight night, when the 
acorns are falling from the oaks in the magnificent Estremenian woods.” 
