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50
BUTCHERY.

confirmed by enact registers, that one day with another, the number amounted to 1200 oxen; besides which, above 20,000 sheep, and 12,000 hogs and calves, are consumed there every week. According to Maitland's calculation for the same year, there were destroyed in London, 98,244 oxen, 711,123 sheep and lambs; 164,760 calves, and 186,932 hogs; and a proportionable quantity of fish and fowl."— Keyster's Travels.

The consumption of sheep and lambs, in London, during the last 12 months, amounted in number to 1,062,700. The number of horned cattle slaughtered, was 164,000. By the inspectors, return, it appears that the number of horsebides produced at Leadenhall-market, amounted to 12,900! —"The News," Oct, 26, 1818.

The following new method of destroying field-mice is seriously given in a modern publication, as an ingenious invention. "Catch, by mean* of traps, or any other method, ten or a dozen field mice, alive, and confine them in a box without food. They will be driven by hunger to destroy and devour each other. The single conqueror and survivor of the rest, will, by this means, have acquired an unnatural and ravenous thirst after the blood of his own species, and when turned out into the fields, from which he was taken, he will go into their holes, and destroy both young and old, in order to satiate his newly ac quired appetite." Could any wretch less infamous than a professed butcher, be the inventer of so diabolical a method?—Cited by the Rev. L. Richmond, in his Appendix to his Sermon on Cruelty.

Instances are not wanting, in which men have first eaten human flesh from the pressure of extreme hanger, and afterwards indulged in it from wanton-