French statistics.
Economical bucolic readers may be interested in this bit of Prussian statistics: "From the 1st day of October, 1863, to like date 1864, there were slaughtered in
Berlin fifteen hundred and fifty-two horses, the flesh of which was sold at from five to six cents the pound." Some years ago the lamented
Geoffrey St. Hilaire, enthusiastic propagator of the sound doctrine of Hippophagy, set out a table, at his residence by the
Jardin des Plantes, with baked, and boiled, and stewed, and toasted, and fried, and smoked, and roasted, horse meat, and preliminary flesh soup of the same.
Doctor Yran, one of a dozen partakers of that generous hospitality, gave a toothsome account of the banquet in the time of it.
A somewhat similar hospitable experiment was tried on volunteers after a lecture on the subject at the
Garden of Acclimation in the
Bois de Boulogne last year.
All who have eaten are agreed that, prejudice being set aside, horse meat is good eating.
And there is exclamation of regret over the loss of 160,000 pounds of nutritious horse meat lost to hungry Frenchmen annually by their unreasonable prejudices.
Of other meat victuals, meanwhile, the following statistics seem to promise them tolerable supply.
There are in
France to-day three million horses, three hundred thousand asses [quadrupeds], three hundred and sixty thousand
mules, ten million two hundred thousand neat cattle (of which 300,000 bulls, 2,000,000 oxen, 5,800,000 cows — the rest calves), thirty-five million sheep (of which twenty-six million pure or crossed merinos), a million four hundred thousand goats, as many adult swine, and three million tender suckling pilings.
To wash down this meat victual the
French folks have wine, got from six million, two hundred and fifty thousand acres of vineyards, whose average product, as this year for example, amounts to one thousand three hundred and twenty millions, five hundred and seventy-six thousand gallons — multiply by five for the bottles.
Of this blessed abundance of drink, to be sure some small rivulets run down foreign throats; but that is a detail.
The large estimate of exports is only a little over three million hectoliters, or about one-twentieth part of the whole product; distillation into brandy takes up say twice as much more; the rest is drunk in
France.
And with all that, do you know that we have very good authority for the woeful belief that we here in
Paris drink one-third at least more wine than ever crosses the
octopi boundary; that is, one bottle is composed of two parts of grape juice and one part of Seine water, drugs, deviltry and
Mackay mixture generally.
