198 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



rate details with regard to his process. There are two points 

 to which he specially attends. The first is, to make the cheese 

 so as to have within its substance the least amount of putrescible 

 material. In addition to the caseiue and sugar of milk, you 

 have a considerable quantity of water, charged with a certain 

 amount of albumen. That albumen is not acted on by the 

 rennet. The rennet turns the caseine into cheese, and so you 

 ought to have as little as can be, besides the pure caseine and 

 the constituents of the rennet, with the flavoring principles. 

 The putrefactive matters that exist, which are albuminous 

 and nitrogenous, must be got rid of. The chemists, I believe, 

 consider nitrogenous matters as tending to favor decomposition. 

 There may be some fallacy in that ; but certain it is that those 

 matters, dissolved in the water remaining in the cheese, consti- 

 tute the best soil on which germs of decay can operate, just as 

 they do in the case of meats. Gale Borden subjects the mate- 

 rials to the action of centrifugal force, and secures a perfect 

 expulsion of those matters, leaving behind a purified curd, of 

 most admirable composition, that will resist almost any influ- 

 ence. You have in that the process of desiccation, which I said 

 yesterday is one of the most valuable methods of rendering 

 meats and other substances incapable of undergoing decay. 



There is another point in Gale Borden's process which is of 

 the greatest interest. Mr. Willard remarked that dairymen 

 were not always satisfied with the results they obtain from the 

 use of definite quantities of rennet, and he said that this arose, 

 to a certain extent, from the alkali that is used to " cut" the 

 rennet. But it is easy to prove that the rennet, which is the 

 stomach of the calf, is used for the purpose of producing in a 

 mass of milk precisely the result that occurs in the calf's 

 stomach. Well, you can understand that if a calf is killed just 

 after he has digested an enormous bulk of milk, when he is not 

 hungry, (and we well know that the sensation of hunger is pro- 

 duced by the repletion of the gastric glands with the acid gastric 

 juice which is being prepared for the process of digestion,) this 

 fact has a great deal to do with the strength of the rennet. It 

 is impossible for the cheese-maker to know anything of the con- 

 ditions that may affect the digestive capacity of the stomach of 

 the calf at any special time of day when he may be slaughtered. 

 What has Gale Borden done ? In his usual way, he has studied 



