THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



165 



some and deleterious to health. The 

 liquid preservatives most commonly used 

 depend for their preserving power upon 

 the presence of formic aldehyde of which 

 they are in part composed. Concerning 

 this disinfectant A. S. Mitchell, chemist 

 for the Wisconsin Dairy and food Com- 

 mission, made the following statement in 

 Hoard's Dairyman in 1898: During the 

 last year a new and most powerful disin- 

 fectant has been foisted upon the market 

 as being harmless, and with the advantage 

 claimed that it could not be detected by 

 chemical means. This substance is formic 

 aldehyde, a substance in general use as a 

 disinfectant and for preserving and hard- 

 ening dead tissues. Doctors have been 

 obliged to abandon its use as an antiseptic, 

 in a very dilute form, for preserving ear 

 washes and similiar solutions, as continued 

 contact in dilutions as high as 1 to 10,000 

 causes the skin to die and peel off'. 



''The fact that a solution is strong 

 enough to kill bacteria in the milk should 

 be sufficient to deter any intelligent man 

 with a conscience from adding it to that 

 which he sells for human food. Because 

 some of the readers of this article have 

 used Preservaline or Freezene in their 

 milk during the past summer without, to 

 their knowledge, having killed, or injured 

 the health of any of the creamery s cus- 

 tomers, is no argument for the continuance 

 of its use. It should not be necessary to 

 prove that the substance will cause direct 

 injury in the doses in which milk is used 

 in order to establish the fact that it is 

 harmful. Many cases of sickness and 

 death have been traced to the presence of 

 chemical preservatives in milk and the cit- 

 izens of Tucson are at present investigating 

 cases in which death is supposed to have 

 resulted from this cause. 



''The laws of twenty-^ix of our states 



make this adulteration of milk a crime 



punishable by a fine or imprisonment. 



Unfortnnately our territory has no law 



providing for the punishment of this crime. 



All creamery men should, then, be a law 

 unto themselves and, standing together, 

 unrelentingly refuse any milk suspected of 

 having been treated with chemical preser- 

 vatives or any other form of adulteration. 



"The use of chemical preservatives is 

 the unscrupulous man's substitute for care 

 and cleanliness, for by proper handling, 

 milk may be kept sweet until delivered to 

 the factory, even in an Arizona climate. 

 A former Timely Hint dwelt somewhat at 

 length upon the necessity of cleanliness in 

 handling milk and we would not like to 

 emphasize more strongly and specifically 

 the necessity of paying proper attention to 

 cooling the milk. 



"One morning in July the writer stood 

 at the weight can of a creamery and took 

 the temperature and tested the acidity of 

 each lot of night's and mixed night's and 

 morning's milk delivered. If these lots 

 of milk had all been handled with equal 

 care as to cleanliness, the temperature at 

 which they bad stood through the night, 

 as indicated by that taken at the creamery 

 in the morning, might be reasonobly con- 

 aidered as responsible for their acid con- 

 dition at that time. The temperatures of 

 the night's milk varied from 78 to 93 de- 

 grees F. , and while the variations in acidity 

 did not conform exactly with those of 

 temperature, generally speaking, the warm- 

 er the milk the worse its condition. It is 

 needless to say that the milk at 9H degrees 

 was sour; it was so sour that particles of 

 clabber stuck to the sides of the weight 

 can as the milk was drawn off. arid yet, the 

 driver insisted that the milk was sweet 

 and became profanely abusive when the 

 weigher politely told him that the milk in 

 that condition would thereafter be refused. 

 Other lots of milk with a temperature as 

 low as 84 degress were sour, indicating 

 that lack of cleanliness had contributed to 

 their souring. 



"As stated before, this condition of 

 affairs is absolutely unnecessary. In our 

 experience at the Experiment Station farm 



