130 OLEOMARGARINE. 



healthy.' This, no doubt, was true a few years ago; but we have made 

 it a point of inquiry for nearly two years past and find that this opinion 

 of the physicians was based not, as a general thing, upon investigation, 

 but upon the sanction given to the stuff by such eminent chemists as 

 Profs. C. F. Chandler, R. Ogden Doremus, etc. The opinion was also 

 based upon Mege's product, which must be admitted to be less dele- 

 terious to health than most, if not all, the others. Then, too, these 

 spurious articles were sold so surreptitiously, until those whose per- 

 sonal interests were incidentally affected stirred up the legislature to 

 investigate, that but little or no attention was given to the subject, and 

 consequently but little known about it; but now, since attention has 

 been so forcibly called to it by the agitation of the dairy commissioner 

 in his endeavor to execute the laws prohibiting its manufacture and 

 sale, no difficulty will attend the finding of plenty of eminent physicians 

 who will declare it may be a very unhealthy article of food. We wish 

 also to state here that the physiology, like the chemistry, of fats until 

 recently has been studied as a whole, and consequently but little was 

 known of their individual properties. 



"We read in Wankryn's Milk Analysis, published in 1874, that 

 'with regard to the question of admixture of foreign fats with milk 

 fat we are unable, in the present condition of our knowledge, to deal 

 with that part of the problem.' We have no less than four reliable 

 chemical methods for distinguishing butter fat from other fats. 

 Experimental physiologists are now entering this unexplored field, 

 and important discoveries may be confidently expected." 



Again he says: "The large proportion of butyrin in butter and its 

 nonoccurrence in an}^ of the other animal fats, together with the vola- 

 tility of its acids, has long impressed us with the belief that it had 

 some important office to perform in the digestive process. Under this 

 belief we began a series of experiments upon the artificial digestion of 

 different fats. Our digestive fluid was composed of 5 grains of Fair- 

 child Brothers' and Foster's 'Extractum pancreatis' and 5 grains of 

 bicarbonate of soda dissolved in 10 c. c. of distilled water. After the 

 solution was complete we added half a dram of melted fat. 



" The whole was well agitated in a test tube and placed in an oven 

 at a temperature of from 100 to 101 F. The fats experimented on 

 were cod-liver oil, butter, oleomargarine butter, the commercial oleo- 

 margarine oil, lard oil, benne oil, cotton-seed oil, lard, and mutton and 

 beef suet. The cod-liver oil was bought from a reliable drug store. 



"Both fresh and stale butter was used and was such as we had made, 

 ourselves, seeing the milk from which it was made drawn from the 

 cow, or such as we had analyzed ourselves and found to be pure cows' 

 butter. Fresh and stale ' oleo ' was used, and was also either made by 

 ourselves under the ' Nathan ' patent, which ' oleo ' contained some free 

 acid, or was that which we had analyzed. The oils were all obtained 

 from 'oleo' makers or dealers in New York City. Both the pure 

 washed dry fats of the butters and ' oleos ' and the natural products 

 were compared, as will be described directly. The contents of the 

 test tubes were examined under a microscope at intervals of one, two, 

 three, four, six, twelve, sixteen, and twenty hours. 



"The cod-liver oil nearly always showed the finest emulsion. 



"Next, and the difference was "of ten just perceptible, came genuine 

 butter. 'Oleo' and lard oil came next, there being frequently no 



