DAIRY AND SEED IMPROVEMENT MEETINGS. 339 



The changes that man has wrought in this animal are httle 

 short of wonderful. From one which gave only enough to sus- 

 tain its young for a few weeks after birth, he has changed it to 

 an animal which in some cases produces in a year milk enough 

 to sustain fifty calves during the same period of their life. The 

 rough head and strong shoulders of the cow in the early days 

 required for self-protection have been supplanted by finer 

 limbs, and she has become a thing of beauty and a source of 

 profit. How was this done? 



If we were to balance the rigid body of a boy horizontally on 

 an upright so that his feet would tilt neither up nor down, and 

 then give him a hard problem in mathematics to work out, what 

 would happen ? The blood would rush to the brain as his mind 

 grappled with the problem and down would go the head. Just 

 so with the cow : The constant manipulation of the udder and 

 breeding for production have reversed the shape of the cow. 

 Like her cousin, the American buffalo, she was wedge-shaped 

 with the large end of the wedge forward, and now in the dairy 

 type we expect to find the large end of the wedge in the rear. 

 So much for the early history of the cow. 



The term "milk" is taken from the Greek word, meaning to 

 press out with the hand. It has come into general use in de- 

 scribing that fluid by which nature has made possible the exist- 

 ence of the human race and the continued life of many animals 

 found closely associated with man. The word "milk" now calls 

 to our minds the lacteal secretion obtained by the complete milk- 

 ing of one or more cows. It differs in a minor degree in the 

 amount of the different constituents it may contain as it comes 

 from the different breeds, but in the main it contains about 87 

 per cent water and 13 per cent total solids. These in turn are 

 made up in part of milk sugar, fat, casein, albumen, and ash. 

 The water in milk is the same compound of hydrogen and 

 oxygen with which we are everywhere familiar. 



During the past five or six years I have had the privilege of 

 listening to many complaints from consumers regarding the 

 quality of milk supplied to them. They complained that the 

 milk was very thin, that it contained added water, chalk, pre- 

 servatives, dirt, manure, milk tickets, buttons, snails, worms 

 and bacteria. There was one lone complaint that "this morning 



