76 BOAED OF AGRICULTURE. 



the cow, there is another class of taints. They get in from 

 putrefactive milk lodged in the corners and seams of pails 

 that are not thoroughly cleansed — that are not cleansed with 

 water at a temperature of two hundred and twelve. I will 

 admit that every taint may he killed with a less temperature, 

 that every fungus growth may he killed with a little lower 

 temperature, but there is nothing safe for us to use but boil- 

 ing water in our milk-vessels ; and I would say to those men 

 who are interested in cheese-factories, or carrying milk to 

 market, if you can buy tin pails, take your wooden milk- 

 pails for swill-pails. A good many folks think that hogs 

 ought to have sour food, and they will furnish it after a while. 

 Buy tin pails, for the reason that you cannot keep wooden 

 pails clean enough, free enough from taint, to use through the 

 hot weather with safety. It is a very simple matter. You 

 all know (or you will if I tell you) that the neater the dairy- 

 woman the sooner she will scour the paint off of your pails ; 

 one goes with the other, just as certainly as water goes down 

 hill. If the dairy-maid is .neat she will have every bit of the 

 paint scoured oif of your pail before the summer is half gone, 

 and it is dangerous to repaint a milk vessel with any of our 

 leads, and then use it right off. The eifect of scouring ofi 

 this paint is simply this : she will scald and scour it, and 

 then stick it on a fence-post or turn it up on a bench in the 

 sun, to dry it during the day. All the seams in the wood 

 will open, and where there are no seams the wood will crack. 

 I have counted over one hundred cracks in an inch, in the 

 bottom of a pail, that would open big enough to take in two 

 milk-spores side by side. You take the pail down and go to 

 milking with those cracks open. As soon as you get your 

 milk in the pail, and it begins to warm up, these cracks close 

 up as tight as a clam, right over the spores, and you have 

 tainted the first milk you have milked. You go on milking, 

 and the next day the process is repeated. Those cracks are 

 open, the putrefactive spores of milk are shut in so close that 

 no woman, however neat, can reach them, because the wood 

 has closed over them ; there they are ; the same cracks open 

 again, and you introduce these putrefactive milk-spores to the 

 first milk you draw into the pail. Hence, I say, set your 

 wooden pails aside and purchase tin ones, and purchase tin 



