The Evolution oy Dairying. 439 



* 



was laying the foundation of a factory cheese system which forty 

 years later should produce annually nearly one quarter of a 

 billion pounds of cheese. Since Jesse Williams' pioneer days 

 there has come in exact knowledge of temperature, the rennet 

 test,, a rational theory of ripening- milk, and these together with 

 investigations of the chemistry and bacteriology of cheese-making 

 are doing much to reduce to a science this most difficult and 

 complex of dairy arts. 



But it is in butter-making, where, judged by the standard of 

 mechanical improvement, evolution has been greatest. It seems to 

 me that above any other theme, the poetry and romance of farm 

 life has clustered and entwined itself about butter-making under 

 the old regime. But some way we cannot but feel that the times 

 have dealt hardly with this. The cow with the crumpled horn is 

 with us still, but the merry-milking maids, with their brimming 

 pails and rounded arms have tripped away into the shadowy past, 

 and we can never see them more unless we shut our eyes. The 

 mossy, sweet-smelling springhouse that we used to read about has 

 given place to an ugly creamery beside the dusty country road, and 

 the soft swash of the dash-churn is lost in the metallic whirr of 

 the combined churn and worker, while the bewitching dairy maid 

 whose rosy charms the dim light but half revealed and half con- 

 cealed has been displaced by a man with bushy whiskers, a dirty 

 shirt, and a rubber apron. And sometimes when we dream a bit 

 it seems as if the world were poorer thereby. Soberly, we honor 

 our mothers or our grandmothers who in bygone days, from the 

 eight-quart pan and the dash-churn, brought forth a golden 

 product colored with the juice of the earn it, and nevertheless 

 an honor to them and to their art. But all that is changed, 

 The hum of the first separator sounded the beginning of the end 

 of individual dairying. Once a method was found of handling 

 large quantities of milk quickly and economically, and butter- 

 making began to follow the tendency of the age toward co-opera- 

 tion and aggregation. 



And butter-making has developed wonderfully in its geographi- 

 cal range. There was a palmy time when Orange county made 

 the butter for New York, and when the notes of the old Orange 

 county bank were printed in golden yellow to indicate that but- 

 ter was the source of the wealth and prosperity of the county. 

 The other day I picked up an old CvHivafor, published in Albany 

 fifty -four years ago this ninth of December, and in their market 



