REVIEW — THE PIG. 
335 
driven to the Woolpack Yard, and, after being unharnessed, were 
regaled with a troughful of beans and wash. A gentleman present 
offered £50 for the whole concern as it stood ; but this offer was 
indignantly declined. In about two hours the animals were re- 
harnessed, and the old farmer drove off with his extraordinary team. 
He stated that he had been six months in training them.” 
The wild BOAR deserves especial mention, from his being 
generally admitted to be the parent stock of the domestic pig 
family. And in the time of the Anglo-Saxons the forests of our 
own country abounded in wild boars. 
“ The precise period at which the wild boar became extermi- 
nated in England and Scotland cannot be correctly ascertained. 
Master John Gifford and William Tivety, who lived in the reign 
of Edward II, composed a book on the craft of hunting, part in 
verse and part in prose; and among the beasts mentioned as those 
hunted, we find 
“To venery I cast me fyrst to go ; 
Of whiche foure beasts there be : that is to say, 
The hare , the herte , the wulfhe, the wild boar also.” 
Then comes an account of “ Swine in America, in Turkey, in 
China, in Africa, in Europe, in Scotland, England, and Ireland,” 
&c. & c. ; followed by chapters containing a popular digest of the 
anatomy and physiology of the various sections and parts of the 
body, with notices of the diseases to which each and singular of 
them is subject, with the causes, treatment, &c., appended, opera- 
tions not excepted — not even that pleasant(I) one yclept “ringing,” 
reminding us of our old “ college ” song — 
“ And pigs he rung, and bells he hung, 
And horses shod and cured.” 
Under the head of “Feeding Swine” (Chap. XII), is a para- 
graph we strongly recommend to the perusal of our cattle-shewers. 
It runs thus : — 
“But there is no good without its attendant evil. It was, 
doubtless, originally intended by those who established the distri- 
bution of prizes for certain kinds of stock, that the prize' animal 
should be the most excellent as to its points, the most useful to 
the farmer, breeder, and butcher, and altogether the most profitable ; 
but not that it should be the fattest ! It is reported that, on Han- 
nah More being asked what was the use of cattle-shows, she re- 
plied, “To induce people to make beef and mutton so fat that 
nobody can eat it.” This certainly is the abuse of them ; and in 
no class of animals is it carried to such an extent as in swine. 
