The manufacture of salt pork is carried on all the year through as the meat is usually kept in the brine, where it will keep perfectly good for a considerable time providing it is perfectly sweet when first placed in the brine. To secure this it is advisable to have the pig killed in the evening, covered over with a cloth to prevent the flies approaching it, and hanging it in a cool place so that all the natural heat has escaped ere it is cut up and placed in the pickle pot. It may be advisable to note that the last is only possible with a small pig during the hot weather. In the mere salting of pork it is usual to use only salt and saltpetre. The use of sugar should be avoided in the summer, as its use is likely to result in fermentation in hot weather. There are two other points in connection with bacon curing on which a change of opinion has taken place, or is taking place. These are the cause of what are called in the trade "seedy bellies," and the effect on the bacon of the female fat pig being in a state of œstrum when it is slaughtered. Until quite recently the first of these troubles, and it is a most serious one to the trade, was generally considered to be due to the second. It was believed by curers that the slight inflammation noticeable in the mammary glands of the female pig when she is in heat resulted in these so-called "seedy bellies" if the pig was in that condition when she was slaughtered. This belief may have been either the cause or the result, or both, of the common saying that the meat of a sow pig killed when it was in heat will not take the salt properly, and that it is therefore advisable to wait until this natural condition has passed away before the pig is slaughtered. This contention has been one of the arguments used when the spaying of sow pigs has been advocated. Of late years comparatively few sow pigs have been spayed, so that the unspayed fat pigs have been nearly as numerous as those male pigs which have been castrated, and as the sow pigs come in heat each three weeks, and continue so for from three to five days, a very considerable proportion of them must be in heat when they are slaughtered at the large bacon-curing factories, without any loss resulting. We may, therefore, assume that it matters little whether the pig be in heat or not when it is slaughtered unless the seedy bellies result.