1902.] STORRS EXPERIMENT STATION — DAIRYING. 259 



in the milk, and that there is, indeed, a strug-gle for existence 

 going on between the various forms of bacteria. There are 

 a good many of them there. Some of them begin to grow, 

 and grow rapidly for a while, and then they disappear. Forty- 

 eight hours so far as the bacteria in milk are concerned is a 

 longer time than forty-eight years in your uncultivated lot. 

 Bacteria in forty-eight hours produce more generations of 

 descendants than the plants in your lot would in forty-eight 

 years. The problem, then, in the milk, for the first forty- 

 eight hours is a big problem, and a bigger one than as to 

 what goes on in that ten-acre lot in forty-eight years. At 

 least that is the way it appears at present. Bacteria grow 

 and die very rapidly. Some finding the conditions in the milk 

 favorable to their growth increase very rapidly and gradually 

 crowd others out of existence. Thev are fig-htinsf with each 

 other hour after hour, and we never can tell what is going to 

 happen. We do not find in any two samples that the same 

 thing happens. Let me give you an illustration. In some 

 of the experiments that Mr. Stocking has been carrying on, 

 some very extraordinary results have been obtained. For 

 instance, in one case we started with two lots of milk. One 

 furnished us about three thousand bacteria per cubic centi- 

 meter, and the other furnished twenty-eight thousand. 

 A while later we looked at the samples again, and the one 

 with three thousand had increased to two billion and a half, 

 and the other to nowhere near that number, and yet those 

 samples had been kept under absolutely the same tempera- 

 ture, and in absolutely the same manner. That shows quite 

 clearly the bigness of the problems which are confronting us 

 in the study of this particular question. I do not know how 

 to explain it. I am completely at a loss to understand it. 

 Some day we shall know. 



Now, in our ten-acre lot we could be pretty sure that after 

 a few years the lot would be covered with grass. There 

 might be other things there, perhaps some kinds of shrubbery, 

 but we could be pretty sure that at some time or other during 

 the course of the fifty years the ground would be covered 

 with grass. Not simply because grass seed is everywhere, 

 but more due to the fact that grass is a hardy plant and can 

 grow under conditions which other plants find unfavorable, 

 and the grass when it once gets into the soil is likely to 



