Xo. 4.] MILK SUPPLY OF CITIES. 65 



Hence a statute standard may be a great help in detecting 

 the man who deliberately cheats the consumer by adulter- 

 ating milk outside of the cow. 



A report of the milk supply of London, by a special ana- 

 lytical and biological commission, in the " British Medical 

 Journal" of July 6, 1895, says that " in an endeavor to en- 

 force purity it is of the first importance to be able to define 

 what is meant by pure ; and it will be seen that the estab- 

 lishment of some arbitrary standard of pure milk is an es- 

 sential preliminary to any effective action being taken to put 

 an end to the wholesale sophistication by which the poor 

 especially are injured and imposed upon. Those who main- 

 tain that whatever can be milked from a healthy cow is milk, 

 are able to show extraordinarily poor specimens, which, 

 for all their poverty, are still milk. The English laws are 

 intended to prevent the sale, not of milk of poor quality, 

 but of that which has been fraudulently tampered with, so 

 that the public analyst is bound to pass as genuine all milks 

 which are at least equal in composition to the poorest genu- 

 ine milk, although in a great majority of cases thus passed 

 he has to do with milk artificially and not naturally weak. 

 If a high standard were fixed, the result would be to con- 

 demn much genuine milk; while, if a low standard were 

 adopted, good milk would be watered down to it. A stand- 

 ard should be fixed with which all milk that is sold should 

 conform, and, however pure or genuine the milk may be, 

 it ought not to be allowed to be sold as whole milk if it is 

 below standard." 



The greatest good to the greatest number seems to call 

 for a statute standard. Unquestionably, it arbitrarily stig- 

 matizes as unlawful the sale of some pure milk which has 

 some food value, but the end justifies this small amount of 

 theoretical wrong. 



What shall the Milk Standard be ? 



Massachusetts has answered 13 per cent of solids, except 

 in May and June. The question, thercfore,"practically re- 

 solves itself to this : Is the Massachusetts standard of 13 



