since another was promulgated four years later, on Nov. 29, 1668, expelling the pigs from the city and calling attention to the fact that they corrupted the atmosphere and thus imperiled the public health. Sanitary considerations and salutary measures of this kind were by no means common in the Middle Ages, but were a gradual outgrowth of the spirit of the Renaissance. It was with the revival of letters that men began to love cleanliness and to appreciate its hygienic value as well as its æsthetic beauty. Little heed was paid to such things in the “good old times” of earlier date, when the test of holiness was the number of years a person went unwashed, and the growth of the soul in sanctity was estimated by the thickness of the layers of filth on the body, as the age of the earth is determined by the strata which compose its crust. The freedom of the city almost universally enjoyed by mediæval swine is still maintained by their descendants in many towns of Southern Italy and Sicily, where they ramble at will through the streets or assemble in council before the palace of the prefect (cf. D’Addosio, _Bestie Delinquenti_, pp. 23-5). In the latter half of the sixteenth century the tribunals began to take preventive measures against the public nuisance by holding the inhabitants responsible for the injuries done to individuals by swine running at large and by threatening with corporal as well as pecuniary punishment all persons who left “such beasts without a good and sure guard.” Thus it is recorded that on the 27th of March, 1567, “a sow with a black snout,” “for the cruelty and ferocity” shown in murdering a little child four months old, having “eaten and devoured the head, the left hand and the part above the right breast of the said infant,” was condemned to be “exterminated to death, and to this end to be hanged by the executioner of high justice on a tree within the metes and bounds of the said judicature on the highway from Saint-Firmin to Senlis.” The court of the judicatory of Senlis, which pronounced this sentence on complaint of the procurator of the seigniory of Saint-Nicolas, also forbade all the inhabitants and subjects of the said seignioralty to permit the like beasts to go unguarded on pain of an arbitrary fine and of corporal chastisement in default of payment. (_Vide_ Appendix P.)