The question of pig-breeding is one that should force itself on the attention of the farmer, and the many lessons which the situation forces upon the country impressed on his mind. At our agricultural census last year, we found not only that our stock of swine showed a decrease of something like two hundred thousand head since 1884, and of over three hundred thousand head since 1883, but also that the country was understocked in a branch of our agriculture that even in these times leaves a profit. We believe that a corn-mill and a few extra pigs would prove a far better market for inferior corn than any other that can be named. An American writer has told us that ‘Cincinnati owes its wealth to the discovery of a method of putting fifteen bushels of corn into a three-bushel barrel and transporting it to distant markets. This has been accomplished by means of the pig. He converts seven bushels of corn into one hundred pounds of pork.’ This is a lesson that the English farmer might well lay to heart; and if this were the case, we are sure that we should not find the pig-stock of the country declining at a time when prices for corn have just been at the lowest ebb in the memory of man.

That we can find a market for an increased production of pork and bacon is certain. Last year, we paid the foreigner—and chiefly the Yankee—some three millions sterling for dead pig-meat, sent to us in the shape of hams, bacon, and pork. There is no reason why we should not this season increase our breeding-herds of swine and make some attempt to wrest from the foreigner this market. It lies at our doors; and the pig himself is perhaps the most profitable of all the meat-making machinery of the farm. The fecundity of the pig is such that the breeding-stock may be increased almost at will. At one of the prize-farms of the Royal Agricultural Society, last year, the judges report that from nine to ten sows are kept every year, and that from these from fifty to sixty pigs are sold every year. Their prolificness is a source of profit, but not the only one. Mr J. C. Morton points out some other reasons why, in fattening pigs, more profit might be expected than in fattening oxen or sheep. One is, that the carcase of the pig includes the head—so much additional weight—which in the case of the ox or sheep is part of the offal. Another is, that the pig is a feeder on all manner of vegetable and animal refuse, extracting nourishment from matter which other animals refuse; and it is useful, therefore, as a scavenger and utiliser of waste food.

There can be only one answer—and it is one often given in times past to amateurs, who have been so struck with the fecundity of the pig, that they have wondered how it is not more largely bred—that can be given to these claims of the pig to greater attention. ‘Oh,’ it may be retorted, ‘you forget that with the pig, like all other farm-stock, it is a question of how much the land will carry. For his feeding, crops of mangolds, cabbage, carrots, and such-like are required; and in summer, cut clover is wanted.’

That may oftentimes be a good answer, but not in a season when all kinds of corn can be bought cheap, and when farmers oftentimes are unable to sell their cereals except at a figure at which it is far more profitable to manufacture it into pork, and send it in that form—fifteen bushels in a three-bushel measure—to market. This is a matter well worthy the attention of farmers at the present moment, and a thought that ought to lead to a large increase in the pig-stock of the country.

THE MINSTRELS.

The minstrels in the gallery,

The revellers in the hall:

Across the pauses of the feast

The singers’ voices fall,

But in the tide of mirth below,