quadruped, who can find his living in the earth, the roadside ditch, or
the forest, and who, out of a supply of grass, roots, or mast, can
furnish ham and bacon to the king's taste and the poor man's
maintenance. The half-wild razorback, with never a clutch of corn to his
back, gives abundant food to the mountaineer over whose forest he
ranges. The cropped or slit ear is the only evidence of human care or
human ownership. He lives the life of a wild beast, and in the autumn he
dies the death of a wild beast; while his flesh, made rich with juices
of acorns, beechnuts, and other sweet masts, nourishes a man whose only
exercise of ownership is slaughter. The hog that can make his own
living, run like a deer, and drink out of a jug, has done more for the
pioneer and the backwoodsman than any other animal.

Take this semi-wild beast away from his wild haunts, give him food and
care, and he will double his gifts. Add a hundred generations of careful
selection, until his form is so changed that it is beyond recognition,
and again the product will be doubled. The spirit of swine is not
changed by civilization or good breeding; such as it was on that day
when the herd "ran down a steep place and was drowned in the sea," such
it is to-day. A fixed determination to have its own way dominated the
creature then, and a pig-headed desire to be the greatest food-producing
machine in the world is its ruling passion now. That the hog has
succeeded in this is beyond question; for no other food animal can
increase its own weight one hundred and fifty fold in the first eight
months of its life.

All over the world there is a growing fondness for swine flesh, and the
ever increasing supply doesn't outrun the demand. Since the dispersion
of the tribes of Israel there has been no persistent effort to
depopularize this wonderful food maker. Pig has more often been the food
of the poor than of the rich, but now rich and poor alike do it honor.
Old Ben Jonson said:--

"Now pig is meat, and a meat that is nourishing and may be desired, and
consequently eaten: it may be eaten; yea, very exceedingly well eaten."

Hundreds have praised the rasher of ham, and thousands the flitch of
bacon; it took the stroke of but one pen to make roast pig classical.

The pig of to-day is so unlike his distant progenitor that he would not
be recognized; if by any chance he were recognized, it would be only
with a grunt of scorn for his unwieldy shape and his une