246 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY 
serve a dangerous beast with an ounce of lead. The first time I 
had the honor of hunting with M. De Montcrocq, I saw him shoot 
at fifty paces a wild boar bounding through a copse of holly, furze, 
and brushwood. The animal remained upon the spot. 
As the piqueur was seeking and could find no wound, Look 
at the side of the left eye,’^ cried the murderer from a distance ; 
^‘it was there I aimed. The ball had entered the eye, so that 
its hole could not be discerned on the first inspection. 
I have hunted the wild boar with gun and with hounds in the 
snow, in ambush, with the fork, with the lance, with the chemical 
match . . . But the most diverting of all these hunts is, beyond 
question, the chase with the fish-hook. A wild boar with fish- 
hooks ? Why not ? M. Alexandre Dumas has caught trout 
with a pruning-bill among the Alps. . . . 
In terminating these articles on the Deer and the Hog, I wonid call the 
reader’s attention to their position and destinies in the United States. 
Here the hog is in the ascendant, and the deer verges on extermination, 
or, in other words, the spirit of coarse, indiscriminating, greedy, material- 
istic selfishness which belongs to civilized trading communities, has dis- 
placed the spirit of noble and independent truthfulness of character ; and 
as the hog is of all animals that whose instincts are most profaned and for- 
gotten in becoming civilized, so are the delicate, primitive instincts of man’s 
true relations with nature most profaned and forgotten in the society which 
rears and represents itself by the hog. 
It is curious to observe how fidelity to passional analogy overrules the 
strongest considerations of interest, even where interest is the God and the 
only God worshiped. For it would have come a great deal cheaper to the 
civilized ravagers of our country to have preserved the deer in sufficient 
numbers to serve for meat, to say nothing of the pleasures of the chase, 
than to have destroyed the deer along with the forests, then cleared and 
planted the soil to feed hogs as they have done. The hog-feeding business, 
as well as the sale of ‘‘ still-slop milk,” is intimately connected with the 
distillation of whiskey, into which the corn-crop of our country is in great 
part converted. 
Now this conversion into whiskey (like some other kinds of unprofitable 
conversion) adds nothing to the value of the corn ; consequently the prof- 
its of the business rest on its facilities for poisoning the social body with 
the flesh of diseased swine or the milk of diseased cows ; the confinement 
