EDITORIAL. 205 



schools and experiment stations as well as for the larger public inter- 

 ested in agricultural and other sciences in the United States. 



Mention has been made of the slowness with which the results of 

 Eussian inquiry are becoming known in the rest of the world. The 

 reason for this is simple. The accounts are published almost exclusively 

 in Eussian. Furthermore the practice of collating the results and pub- 

 lishing them in the form of abstracts and monographs which is so com- 

 mon in western Europe and the United States has not been developed 

 in Eussia, so that the specialist who would know what is being done in 

 that country is under the necessity of collating it from a large mass of 

 scattered literature which is difficult to find and obtain and is in a lan- 

 guage which very few outside of Eussia are able to read. The desira- 

 bility of an improvement in this matter, rendering the results of Eussian 

 inquiry available to the outside world, is becoming apparent, and it is 

 hoped that before long the fruits of Eussian inquiry may be made more 

 readily available to English readers. Arrangements have already been 

 made for preparing abstracts of agricultural investigations directly 

 from the Eussian for the Eecoixl. 



All recent investigations on the ripening of cheese have started out 

 from the generally accepted principle that the changes in the casein 

 were due to the action of bacteria or other microorganisms. By many 

 investigators the change was believed to be due to peptonizing bacte- 

 ria, and an abstract of a Eussian article, given in this number, reports 

 what was intended as additional evidence in support of this view. The 

 author (Shirokih) studied the change in the casein of milk inoculated 

 with pure cultures of peptonizing bacteria, lactic acid bacteria, etc., 

 and concluded that the peptonizing bacteria and the fungus O'idium 

 lactis were responsible for all the changes. 



In opposition to this view, Dr. Russell, of the Wisconsin Station, has 

 found that the number of peptonizing bacteria in ripening cheese dimin- 

 ishes rapidly from day to day until very soon these bacteria are almost 

 entirely eliminated. This occurs before there is any evidence of phys- 

 ical change in the casein. He is convinced that the peptonizing bacte- 

 ria do not act the same in green cheese as they do in milk, for the 

 conditions in the cheese seem to be unfavorable for their growth. 



Continuing his investigations on the cause of the change, in elabo- 

 ration with Dr. Babcock, of the same station, a discovery has been 

 made which throws a new light on the question. Only a preliminary 

 account of this investigation has yet been published. In some experi- 

 ments with milk treated with an antiseptic it was noticed that the milk 

 curdled and underwent digestive changes resulting in products similar 

 to normally cured cheese. This suggested the presence of an enzyin 

 or enzyms in normal milk; and in further experiments where the possi- 

 bility of bacteriological action was precluded, the presence of such 

 unorganized ferments was shown conclusively. By physiological meth- 

 ods extracts were prepared from separator slime which contained these 



