however, from far in the teens, dwindled to six, four, and at length our favourite sow produced one. Nor was this all. The roaded bacon three inches thick, for which, when trimmed with beans, we have seen gastronomes of undoubted authority desert farther-fetched dainties, was replaced on our table by six inches of rather flabby fat, unredeemed by lean. So when we could not even save our bacon we gave up the pursuit; and we are inclined to think that our experience was a sort of epitome of high breeding. A snub-nosed race, called Chinese pigs, or Tunks, have some distinctive marks. They may, for what we know, claim an antiquity coeval with the Shee-king and Shoo-king, though, indeed, we are not precisely aware of the authority on which they are said to have come from "the Flowery Land." They are funny little fellows; pert and queer in their ways; very symmetrical; poor breeders, and not exactly the pigs to furnish contract bacon. The Neapolitan, the Portuguese, and the Berkshire pigs have many points in common. For a constant supply of pleasing pigs we should select the Lisbon market. They are the only cleanly animals of a domestic nature (we make no exceptions) in Portugal; very uniform, very symmetrical when fat, and of sufficient activity to get their living in the chestnut-woods during the early part of their lives. To this feeding we should have attributed the delicacy of their pork, if we had not heard, on good authority, that in America mast-fed bacon is very inferior both in firmness and quality to that which is fed on grain. Whether the animal which, by an agreeable alliteration, is called a Hampshire Hog owes any of the celebrity of his bacon to acorns and beech-nuts we will not pronounce. We are inclined to attribute a good deal to careful and scientific curing. Pigs, both in their natural and domestic state, deteriorate if exposed to cold. We are told that the wild boars of Barbary, Bengal, and Scinde are much finer animals than those which endure the severity of a northern winter in the forests of Germany. Nature made the pig

an animal of great activity and spirit. Man, in the due exercise of the power which has been conferred upon him of moulding nature to his own convenience, has made him a creature of flitches and hams. We think, however, that, in the case of the pig, the transforming power has been exercised rather wantonly. Of all the overloaded animals which deform our cattle-shows, none so entirely outrages delicacy as the improved pig. Unless his legs shrink under the weight of his shapeless carcass; unless his belly trails on the ground; and unless his eyes are quite closed up by fat, he has no chance of a prize. The extremes of domestic swine are Prince Albert's prize pig at the one end, and the pig whose domestic hearth is in the hut of the Finn, all the way from St. Petersburg to Archangel, at the other. This latter is an animal of skin and bone. From his looks you would not suppose that he has any vitals: there seems to be no room for them. His bristles, if not his ornament, are at least his distinction. He furnishes them to our markets to an extent both in quantity and value which, but for custom-house statistics, would be thought fabulous, and to which we only reconcile our judgment by recollecting that he appears, by these his representatives, on the toilettable of every lady, we might almost say of every female, in Great Britain. As to flesh, if one could conceive such an animal to be ever subject to the tender passion, the epithalamium with which Porson honoured the union of the lean master of Benet with a leaner bride would be highly applicable to him :—

"Though you could not, like Adam, have gallantly said,

'Thou art flesh of my flesh,' for flesh ye had none,

You at least might have said, 'Thou art bone of my bone.""

Such are the extremes. "Medio tutissimus ibis."

But in swinecraft we are pigmies when compared with the ancients. Ulysses, at one swine-station in Ithaca (and we are told that he had others on the mainland), which was under the care of Eumæus, had 600 breeding sows. They were lodged in twelve stately chambers (fifty in a

chamber), built of quarried stone, and adequately furnished with yards, fenced in by a substantial paling. The male pigs (woλλòr maûgoTegos) were only 360. This disproportion of numbers is accounted for by a statement of the insatiable voracity of the "godless suitors." So much for swine. On the subject of turkeys, geese, fowls, rabbits, and "such small deer," we must refer our readers to the "Book of the Farm." Be it noted, however (though not mentioned in this new Stephani Thesaurus), that the prime turkeys of East Anglia, whom we apologize for classing among "small deer," are capons. This is true at least of the huge Goliahs, the glories of Guildhall, one of which an astonished Paddy pronounced "fit to draw a gig."

In comparing the merits of the various agricultural animals which furnish food to man, we have frequently spoken of quality, and we wish to explain a little more definitely what we intend thereby. We consider firmness in the fat and a fine grain in the lean to be the criteria of quality. We believe that in those animals where fat and lean are associated, the firmest fat invariably covers the finest grained lean. Any person who has had the good fortune to eat Highland venison with fat on it will have observed that the fat of a stag differs from that of a Lincolnshire tup much as heart-of-oak differs from the wood of a Weymouth pine or poplar. The wild deer's fat is a substance of firm texture, hardly degradable, we should think, into dips or short sixes. The fat of the fallow-deer possesses much of the same enviable quality. When we descend from the forest and the park to the pasture and stall, we can form a series both for sheep and beasts which will hardly be called in question. For sheep-the Mountaineers, the Southdowns, various nondescripts, down to the New Leicesters. For beasts-Scots generally, Devons, Herefords, indiscriminate crosses and mongrels, down to the Improved Short-horns. In each case the butchers' shops will confirm our lists. There the animal which stands at the top will sell for at least 1d. per lb. more than the

animal which stands at the bottom. In both cases, in the article of quality, the new and very artificial breeds stand decidedly below all their competitors. To them must be awarded the merit of producing a coarse article in great abundance and at a low price, suited to those whose appetites are keen and not critical, and whose means are limited; whereas the old races will furnish an article of higher quality for those whose tastes incline, and whose means permit, them to be more fastidious. Whether any individual farmer shall produce one article or the other must be left to his own decision; and, if wise, he will decide the point on the same grounds of position, facilities, and connexion which determine a cotton-spinner to make forties cotton-twist, or to make one-hundred-and-sixties; and which determine a calico-printer to manufacture prints for ladies, or prints for housemaids.

Our readers will have observed further that in all these lucubrations we have made a marked distinction between races and breeds, and we wished to state the basis on which that distinction rests. Of late years certain sages have brought prominently before the public a science to which, in the prevailing rage for a Greek nomenclature, they have given the name of Ethnology. This science occupies itself in investigating the localization, the affinities, and the distinctive qualities of the various races of men. It is a circumstance which we would rather call satisfactory than singular, that the observations made and the facts collected -made and collected with true philosophic indifference as to the conclusion to which they might tend-all lead to the belief that mankind have sprung from one original pair. At this conclusion, on grounds merely philosophical, Cuvier and Humboldt have both arrived. We call the conclusion satisfactory, because it may re-assure some very worthy people, who discountenance philosophical investigations because they entertain narrow-minded apprehensions that revelation will not be able to take care of itself. As men multiplied, their different families were placed in different

circumstances of climate, soil, food, security, and demands for exertion, both mental and bodily. These external circumstances produced modifications both in the form and capacities of their bodies, and in the qualities and capacity of their minds. When successive generations had been so long subjected to the same influences that these modifications had become so far engrafted and permanent, that they were found in all the individuals who remained under the influences, and would endure for long periods even in those who were removed from them, a distinct race of men had been called into existence. Two familiar illustrations of this permanence will occur to every one: the Jew, though by ethnologists he would only be considered as one subdivision of an important race, is said to have maintained his national physiognomy in all the various circumstances in which the Dispersion has placed him and we know that the Negro, when not contaminated by white blood, retains his woolly hair, his thick lips, his long heel, and his mental incapacities, though he has been transplanted for generations from the banks of the Tchadda to those of the Mississippi. To any investigation into races of animals the aid of language is wanting altogether: history also is more silent, and tradition more obscure, than in the case of man. Still considerable materials remain to those who may be inclined to pursue an interesting inquiry, for which we have neither leisure nor knowledge. Even zoologists, who seldom pretend to have much respect for the Mosaic records, seem, on the whole, inclined to an orthodox conclusion to wit, that animals came as individual pairs from the hands of the Creator. This opinion is favoured, it must be owned, by operations of nature of which unphilosophical people are daily witnesses. Nature permits the connexion of many animals and birds, which have considerable apparent similarity, to be productive of offspring, but refuses to carry fertility further. The horse breeds with the ass, the dog with the fox, the pheasant with the domestic fowl, the goldfinch with the canary; but all the