The usual method of fattening hogs, is to give them plenty of barley, acorns, cabbages, boiled peas, roots, and water mixed with bran. In two months they are fat; their lard is thick but neither firm nor white; and their flesh, though good, is rather insipid. They may be fattened at less expence in woody countries, by conducting them into forests during autumn, when acorns, chesnuts, beech-mast, must quit their husks and fall from the trees. They eat indiscriminately all wild fruits, and fatten in a short time, especially if a little warm water mixed with bran and pease-meal is given to them every night on their return home; this drink makes them sleep and augments their fat to such a degree that they are sometime unable to walk or scarcely move. They fatten much the quickest in autumn, both on account of the plenty of food and because they lose much less by perspiration than in the summer months. It is not necessary in fattening the hog, to wait, as with other cattle, until he is full grown, for the older he is the more difficult it is to fatten him, and his flesh decreases in goodness with age. Castration, which should always precede fattening, is usually performed when they are six months old, and either in spring or autumn, as both heat and cold are injurious to the healing of the wound. When this operation is performed in the spring, they are generally fit for fattening the following autumn. They continue growing for four or five years, and even to that period it is not limited, as boars kept for propagation sometimes increase in size during the sixth, and the wild boar is always larger in proportion to the number of his years: the life of which sometimes extends to 25 or 30. According to Aristotle hogs live twenty years, and both males and females are fertile till the fifteenth. They can couple by the age of nine or twelve months, but it is better to keep them separate until they are eighteen months or two years. The sows have but few young at the first litter, and those are generally weak, even when a year old; she is at all times in season and solicits the male; she goes four months after copulation, and litters at the beginning of the fifth; she will receive the male almost immediately after and consequently bring forth twice in the year. The wild sow has but one litter in the year, and as she perfectly resembles the domestic one in every other respect, this difference may arise both from her not having the same kind of nourishment, and being obliged to suckle her young much longer. In fifteen days pigs are fit to kill; as many females are unnecessary, and as castrated hogs bring most profit, it is customary not to leave with the mother, after that period, more than one or two females, and seven or eight males.