PUTREFACTIVE FERMENTS. 79 



ruined. You can no more make a first-class article of butter 

 or cheese from putrefactive milk than you can relish a rotten 

 egg, not a bit. The arrangement of our chees-efactories has 

 been wrong. I visited one in my own ceunty where they had 

 dropped the floor below the sills, laying it upon sleepers that 

 rested upon the ground, for the purpose of getting a descent. 

 They had knocked oif a board above the sill, and there was 

 space where the whey might escape. I went in there one day, 

 and wallved along over the floor, and the floor had a degree of 

 elasticity that you seldom find in a floor. Wherever I set my 

 foot, with about two hundred pounds avoirdupois, the floor 

 would spring down. It was a beautiful floor to walk on, l)ut 

 I cast my eye as I walked along to the lower end of the 

 room, and I made this discovery : that opposite where I set 

 my foot, for two or three feet ahead and two or three feet 

 back of me, theVe would something roll out. It was whey, 

 alive with those things that crawl until they fly. What do 

 you call them? 



Mr. Hubbard. They come without calling. 



Mr. Lewis. Yes, that is so. You fix a pool of filth and 

 rottenness, and they will come without calling ; but they will 

 take to themselves wings and fly away. Well, I walked back 

 and forth over this floor, and I says to the factory-man, 

 "what an easy floor this is to walk on ; there is a beautiful 

 spring to it," and I would press the boards down as I walked 

 along, watching the eflTect as I did so ; and finally I says to the 

 man, "If those maggots didn't run away, I would." I do not 

 believe that any factory-men in Massachusetts have any such 

 fools about their establishments. There is hardly space big 

 enough to set a factory where the ground is level. I do not 

 think there was more than an inch to a rod of pitch at that fac- 

 tory, and it pitched right under the floor. It was scientifically 

 arranged for the breeding of maggots ! I hope the ladies will 

 not take any ofi*ence at what I say. My mother was a woman, 

 once. There was nobody in the world that I ever loved as I 

 did my mother, and I speak to you simply in the very 

 language that she taught me. I know that our lady friends, 

 whom I so much admire, will read an article that they will 

 not listen to, and I mean no oflence when I speak of these 

 things in terms such as they deserve, perhaps. I wish I had 



