arising from the food-supply which our pigs afford is well
seen in the use which is made of their flesh in all the ruder work of
men, at least in the case of those of our race. Our soldiers and
sailors are to a great extent fed on the flesh of these creatures,
which lends itself readily to preservation by the use of salt. So
rapidly can these animals be bred, owing to the number of young which
they produce in a litter and the swiftness of their growth, that
sudden demands for an increase in the supply, such as occurred at the
outbreak of our civil war, can quickly be met. If the need should
arise, the quantity of pork produced in this country could readily be
doubled within eighteen months. This is the case with no other source
of flesh-supply, and this fact gives the pig a peculiar importance.

Owing to the remarkably complete domestication of this animal, and
also to the fact that it is omnivorous, the creature has ever been a
favorite with the cotter class. Those folk, who can afford neither
sheep nor horned cattle, can often provide the food for pigs, and
thus, in turn, be much better fed than they would otherwise be.

It is only within two centuries that our pigs have attained to
anything like the domestication in which we commonly find them. Of old
they were allowed to range the forests, much as they do in certain
parts of our Southern States at the present day. In some parts of
Europe, particularly in the southern portion of the continent, this
method of rearing and feeding is still common. It was and is
advantageous, for the reason that the creature, by its remarkably keen
sense of smelling and its singular capacity for overturning the
ground, is able to provide itself with abundant food in the way of
grubs and roots which are not at the disposition of any other animal.
It was only as the public forests disappeared that pigs came to
receive any considerable part of their provender from the products of
tilled fields. In this stage of our agriculture, when all the land was
possessed, the life of the pig was necessarily more restricted, and he
became the denizen of a pen. In the earlier state there was no cost
for his keeping; in the latter, except so far as he could be fed from
the waste of a household, he is an expensive animal.

It is with this last state of the pig, when he became the most housed
of our domesticated animals, that the work of the breeder really
began. The aim of those who have developed the pi