Composition of Cheese. 7 



I have selected these analyses from a considerable number of 

 milk-analyses lately made in my laboratory. They illustrate 

 strikingly the great differences that exist in the quality of new- 

 milk. It might readily be imagined that milk such as that 

 which I examined on the 6th of September, containing 90 per 

 cent, of water, had either been diluted with water, or at least 

 produced by cows fed on mangold-tops, distillery- wash, or similar 

 food. Such, however, was not the case. Thercows which yielded 

 this poor milk were out in pasture, and every precaution was 

 taken to get a fair average of the milkings from some 8 or 10 

 cows. The milk was received by me almost directly after it had 

 left the udder, and I can thus vouch for its being genuine, and 

 its watery condition natural. The pasture, however, was poor 

 and overstocked, so that the daily growth of grass furnished 

 hardly enough food to meet the daily waste to which the animal 

 frame is subject, and was thus not calculated to meet an extra 

 demand of materials for the formation of butter and curd. The 

 milk consequently became not merely deficient in quantity, but 

 also poor in quality. It is well then to bear in mind that an in- 

 sufficient quantity of food in the case before us caused the supply of 

 milk to be small and unusually poor. This analysis illustrates and 

 confirms a principle generally recognised by good dairy-farmers, 

 that it is bad policy to keep more cows than can be liberally 

 supplied with food. The evening's milk on the 6th of September, 

 it will be noticed, contained about per cent, more water and 

 somewhat less casein and butter than the morning's milk of the 

 same cows on the same day. From this and other instances 

 some may be disposed to infer that the morning's milk is gene- 

 rally richer than the evening milk a view which I myself was 

 disposed to adopt until a larger range of experiments proved to 

 me its inaccuracy. In truth, the comparatively greater richness 

 of the morning or the evening milk depends on a variety of cir- 

 cumstances so complicated as to require a lengthened discussion, 

 which I must postpone to a future paper. 



The remarkably small quantity of butter in the milk of the 

 6th of September appears very striking when contrasted with the 

 proportion of butter found in good milk, and still more so when 

 compared with the unusually large quantity contained in the 

 rich milk analysed on the 21st of October. This milk, like that 

 of the 6th of September, was produced by cows out in grass, 

 without any additional food rich in fat, such as linseed or rape- 

 cake, and yet it contained nearly four times as much butter as 

 that of the cows kept on an insufficient quantity of poor grass. 

 The beneficial influence of abundance of good pasture on the 

 butter-yielding qualities of milk, and the contrary effect of a 



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