

TECHNICAL EDUCATION IN DAIRY WORK. 151 



Here, then, was practical evidence of the value of tuition in 

 dairy work ; this, however, was tuition only, and not technical 

 instruction ; but if it could benefit the people so much, surely 

 technical training would benefit them more. 



When the public money referred to was allocated to the newly 

 formed county councils, for purposes of technical education, 

 there was some difficulty at first in deciding how to employ it. 

 But in all dairying counties the manipulation of milk was re- 

 garded as an art of great importance, an art to which improve- 

 ment must be afforded, so far as was practicable, by means of 

 technical education. A great deal of tuitional work in dairying 

 has been done in the shires by travelling instructors, who, em- 

 ployed by county councils, have gone from place to place, taking 

 the necessary dairy equipment with them, and in some cases 

 a large tent to work in ; this was in default of suitable farm 

 dairies or other buildings being available. Pupils were invited, 

 by circular or otherwise, to enrol themselves in a class in each 

 of the more important dairying centres or parishes. In some 

 instances the peripatetic or itinerant instructor in the art of 

 butter-making had a large travelling van, in which all the 

 equipments could be conveyed from one place to another in 

 the most convenient way that was available. 



For a time, during which the idea of itinerant tuition in 

 dairy-work was a novelty, the classes were in some places 

 well attended, whilst in others they were not. The great 

 stumbling-block in the path of dairy reform was the difficulty 

 in some instances and the impossibility in others of bringing 

 home to the older dairymaids, convincingly, the fact that some 

 of them if not quite all were hardly perfect in the ait 

 of butter-making, and that a little practical and theoretical 

 tuition mixed, on the spot was just the one thing needful. 

 A little story, which has the advantage of being literally true, 

 will best illuminate this phase of the question. 



Some years ago, probably nearly a score, a druggist in a 

 provincial town asked me, as I happened to be passing by his 

 shop, to "come in, and give my opinion on a couple of pounds 

 of butter he had bought that day from a dairy- farmer's wife in 



