Two
simultaneous blows with a cleaver severed his head and his hind quarters
from the trunk, and the subdivision of these was accomplished by three
or four masterly cuts with the same instrument. Near the table are the
open mouths of as many large wooden pipes as there are kinds of pieces
in a hog, and these lead to the various apartments below, where the
several pieces are to be further dealt with. Gently down their
well-greased pipe slip the hams to the smoking-department; away glide
the salting-pieces to the cellar; the lard-leaves slide softly down to
the trying-room; the trimmings of the hams vanish silently down their
pipe to the sausage-room; the tongue, the feet, and every atom of the
flesh, start on their journey to the places where they are wanted; and
thus, in the twenty seconds, the six-hundred-pounder has been cut to
pieces and distributed all over an extensive building.

The delivery of three finished hogs a minute requires the following
force of men: two pen-men; one knocker-down; one sticker; two
bristle-snatchers; four scrapers; six shavers (who remove the hair from
parts not reached by the scrapers); two gamble-men; one gutter; one
hose-boy; one slide-boy; one splitter (who fastens the animal open to
facilitate cooling); two attendants upon the cutters; one weigher; two
cleaver-men; four knife-men; one ham-trimmer; one shoulder-trimmer; one
packer; six ham-salters; one weigher and brander; one lard-man; one
book-keeper; seven porters and laborers,--in all, fifty men. The system
therefore, enables one man to convert into pork thirty hogs a day. The
proprietors of these packing-houses pay the owners of the animals sixty
cents each for the privilege of killing them, and derive their profit
from the refuse. The bristles of a hog are worth seventeen cents; his
tongue, five cents; the hair and the fat of the intestines pay the
entire cost of killing, dressing, and packing.

There is a moral in all this. In such establishments, a business which
in itself is disgusting, and perhaps barbarizing, almost ceases to be
so, and the part of it which cannot be deprived of its disgusting
circumstances is performed by a very few individuals. Twenty men, in
four months, do all that is disagreeable in the slaying of one hundred
and eighty thousand hogs, and those twenty men, by the operation of
well-known laws, are sure to be the persons to whom the work is least
offensive and least injurious.

There are many other ind