A recent subscriber wants advice how to feed pigs of 25 to 35 pounds weight, that are to be kept over winter and fitted for sale at about six months old--whether coarse food will not help them as much in winter as in summer. How roots and pumpkins will answer in lieu of grass, and what can be fed when this green food is gone? He has had poor success in growing young pigs on corn alone. He has a reasonably warm pen for winter.

The question of food is constantly recurring, and this is one of the best evidences of the advancement of the country in the feeder's art. When people are making no inquiry as to improved methods in any direction, no progress can be made. There has been more progress made in the philosophy of feeding during the last thirty years than in the century and a half previous.

In pig feeding in the dairy districts, young pigs generally grow up in a very healthy condition, owing to the refuse milk of the dairy, which furnishes the principal food of young pigs. Skim-milk contains all the elements for growing the muscles and bones of young pigs. This gave them a good, rangy frame, and, when desired, could be fed into 400 or 500 pounds weight. But the fault attending this feeding was, that it was too scanty to produce such rapid growth as is desired. It took too long to develop them for the best profit. It had not then been discovered by the farmer that it costs less to put the first hundred pounds on the pig than the second, and less for the second than the third, etc.; that it was much cheaper to produce 200 pounds of pork in six months than in nine and twelve months. When it became evident that profit required more rapid feeding, then they began to ply them continually with the most concentrated food--corn meal or clear corn. If this was fed in summer, on pasture, no harm was observed, for the grass gave bulk in the stomach, and the pigs were were healthy and made good progress. But if the young pigs were fed in pen in winter upon corn meal or clear corn, the result was quite different; this concentrated food produced feverish symptoms, and the pigs would lose their appetite for a few days, drinking only water, which, after a while, would relieve the stomach, and the pigs would eat vigorously again. Now, had they been fed a few quarts of turnips, carrots, beets, or pumpkins, to give bulk to the stomach, and separate the concentrated food, no harm would have come. This gives the gastric juice a free circulation through the contents of the stomach, the food is properly digested and applied to the needs of the body instead of causing fever by remaining in the stomach.--Live Stock Journal.