prolific, and may easily be fattened to an enormous weight. This breed is also found in Portugal and some parts of the south of Italy; it closely resembles the Siamese pigs, and has doubtless originally sprung from them. The far-famed Bologna sausages are made from the flesh of this animal.
ITALY.
Italy too is in some degree celebrated for its pigs, the best breeds of which, like the Maltese, are small, black, destitute of bristles, and delicate in flesh. The Neapolitan breed has been extensively exported, for the purpose of crossing with other kinds, and has found considerable favor in many parts of England. In themselves these pigs are not sufficiently hardy for general use, but, crossed with rougher breeds, they yield a valuable progeny, fine in form, delicate in flesh, and easy to fatten. There is a much larger race of swine bred in the Duchy of Parma, and generally considered to be the finest breed in Italy, in every point of view.
In Palermo, Bosco, the environs of Rome, and the neighborhood of Bologna, Count Chateauvieux tells us pigs are kept. Those at Bosco, on the Apennines, he describes as a good breed, which the farmers fatten on chestnuts and milk, housing them in the winter and suffering them to run over the mountains during the summer. At the farm of Campo Morto he found a herd of 2000, of the domestic breed, and black. They run all the year on the immense tract of land which extends towards the sea, are fattened on nuts and acorns, and yield excellent meat. They are not indigenous, but have been brought thither to stock the woods, and they are regarded by the proprietor of that farm as the most valuable part of his stock, for their keep costs him little or nothing, and they yield a very good profit.
The pigs he found on the marshy plains of Polesimo, between Bologna and Ferrara, he describes as large, lean, thin-flanked, and long-limbed animals. (Chateauvieux's Letters from Italy.)
GERMANY.
Pursuing our way to Germany we meet with totally different animals, submitted for the most part to an entirely different management. The common breeds of the country are every where described as huge, gaunt, long-legged, lean-bodied, greyhound-like animals, with exceedingly long snouts and coarse bristles, forming almost as much of a mane on the neck and shoulders as those of the wild boar.
In Prussia and many parts of Poland a rather smaller but scarcely less uncouth race are met with, of a yellow or reddish-brown color.
