The habits of animals, and the nature of their food, affect the quality of their flesh. Exercise increases the amount of osmazome, and consequently renders the meat more savory. The mutton of Wicklow, Wales, and other mountainous regions is remarkably sweet, because the animals that furnish it are almost as nimble as goats, and skip from crag to crag in quest of their food. The fatty mutton, with pale muscle, which is so abundant in our markets, is furnished by very young animals forced prematurely into full development. Those animals have abundance of food placed within easy reach; their muscular activity is next to _nil_, and the result is, that their flesh contains less than its natural proportion of savory ingredients. It is the same with all other animals. The flesh of the tame rabbit is very insipid, whilst that of the wild variety is well flavored. Wild fowls cooped up, and rapidly fattened, lose their characteristic flavor; and when the domesticated birds become wild their flesh becomes less fatty, and acquires all the peculiarities of game. Ducks, whether wild or tame, ordinarily yield goodly meat; but the flesh of some of those that feed on fish smacks strongly of cod-liver oil. Birds which subsist partly on aromatic berries assimilate the odour as well as the nutriment of their food. The flesh of grouse has very commonly a slight flavor of heather. Foster states that in Tahiti pigs are fed upon fruit, which renders their fat very bland and their flesh like veal. Animals subjected to certain kinds of mutilation fatten more rapidly than they do in their natural state. Capons increase in weight more rapidly than cocks, poulards than hens, bullocks than bulls, and cows deprived of their ovaries than perfect cows. Why it is that the flesh of mutilated animals should be fatter and more tender than that of whole animals, we know not; we only know that such is the fact. The hunting of animals renders their flesh more tender; the cause assigned is, that the great exertion of the muscles liquefies their fibrine, which is the toughest of their constituents. The meat of animals brought very early to maturity is seldom so valuable as the naturally developed article. Lawes and Gilbert state that portions of a sheep that had been fattened upon _steeped_ barley and mangels, and which gave a very rapid increase, yielded several per cent. less of cooked meat, and lost more, both in dripping and by the evaporation of water, than the corresponding portions of a sheep which had been fed upon _dry_ barley and mangels, and which gave only about half the amount of gross increase within the same period of time.