SPECIFIC GRAVITY TEST. 67 



of some (and I am sorry it is so), to add to the weigBt of 

 their milk. Some men do this more out of the spirit of 

 rivahy, emulation, or something else, than they do for the 

 little gain they expect to make from it; but others, I think, 

 go in for the dollars and cents, because we have found, in 

 almost every association in New York, where we have now a 

 great many cheese factories and butter factories, a black 

 sheep in the flock. I would not have you understand, I would 

 not even have you think, that I believe the system of associ- 

 ated dairying has made a single dishonest man in New York. 

 We had, you all know, dishonest ones there before the ftictory 

 system came into vogue, but it has developed rascality where 

 we little suspected it. Men with whom I would have trusted 

 my pocket-book with the money uncounted, have been detect- 

 ed in wetting up their milk with a little water. I will 

 qualify that by saying, that I would have trusted them with 

 my wallet, not only because of my belief in their honesty, 

 but because of the small quantity of funds it contains. The 

 factory men became alarmed at once. It was a terrible state of 

 afiairs, and it looked to us, for a time, as though the whole 

 factory system was going under, — was to be drowned in a 

 few pails of water. Scientific men brought out what was 

 called a lactometer. It is a simple instrument, merely a float. 

 It is in principle a hydrometer, but graduated for the purpose 

 of testing the specific gravity of milk. [jNIr. Lewis exhibited 

 one of these instruments.] It is, as you see, a hollow glass 

 tube. It has a stem, graduated, commencing at zero for 

 milk, and ten for water, and is divided into forty equal spaces 

 between the two points, each one of which represents two 

 and one-half per cent. When the factory men had this 

 brought out, they supposed that that was the life-boat in 

 which the factory system would be saved from the inevitable 

 wreck that appeared before them from these milk-and-water 

 men, and our courts not only attempted to establish the speci- 

 fic gravity of milk as a test of its purity (an awful mistake, 

 gentlemen), but the greatest efibrts ever made in our supreme 

 court, I think, the efibrts made to convict Tweed and some 

 other New York men, were equalled in the county of Herki- 

 mer, before the supreme court, to make that instrument tell 

 whether a man stood innocent or guilty of watering his milk. 



