The Book of Household Management by Mrs. Beeton

peculiar features as the species known to us as the Chinese pig; and as it is the general belief that to this animal and the Neapolitan hog we are indebted for that remarkable improvement which has taken place in the breeds of the English pig, it is necessary to be minute in the description of this, in all respects, singular animal. The Chinese, in the first place, consists of many varieties, and presents as many forms of body as differences of colour; the best kind, however, has a beautiful white skin of singular thinness and delicacy; the hair too is perfectly white, and thinly set over the body, with here and there a few bristles. He has a broad snout, short head, eyes bright and fiery, very small fine pink ears, wide cheeks, high chine, with a neck of such immense thickness, that when the animal is fat it looks like an elongated carcase,--a mass of fat, without shape or form, like a feather pillow. The belly is dependent, and almost trailing on the ground, the legs very short, and the tail so small as to be little more than a rudiment. It has a ravenous appetite, and will eat anything that the wonderful assimilating powers of its stomach can digest; and to that capability, there seems no limit in the whole range of animal or vegetable nature. The consequence of this perfect and singularly rapid digestion is an unprecedented proneness to obesity, a process of fattening that, once commenced, goes on with such rapid development, that, in a short time, it loses all form, depositing such an amount of fat, that it in fact ceases to have any refuse part or offal, and, beyond the hair on its back and the callous extremity of the snout, _the whole carcase is eatable_. [Illustration: CHINESE SOW.]