AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 487 



wprm tlie milk. This fact is perfectly familiar to every dairy 

 farmer, wlio knows that the color and taste of milk and cream 

 are affected by the plants on which the cow feeds. For example, if 

 fed on turnips, cabbages, or wild onions, it is immediately percepti- 

 ble, not only in the milk, but the butter. If she eats madder, the 

 milk is blood red; if safron, yellow. I have often noticed, that 

 when my cows are fed upon one pasture, they produce a large 

 quantity of fatty matter, yielding much butter; and on another, 

 casein or curd, adapted to cheese making. This has given rise, 

 in dairy districts, to the practice of varying the food artificially, 

 in addition to the natural pastures, according to the result desired 

 to be obtained. By the addition of potatoes, beets and oil cake 

 to the natural pastures, I found the curd or cheese much 

 increased in the milk; then by feeding dry hay, in the same con- 

 nection, the curd decreased very perceptibly, and butter partially 

 Increased. The fat of butter and the fat of animals, consists of a 

 solid and fluid portion; the fluid is known by chemists as oleine, 

 which is identical in all animals, and is the same as olive oil. It 

 abounds more in the fat of the hog than sheep, consequently pork 

 fat is much softer than mutton suet. The fat of man is precisely 

 like that of a goose, and similar to that which exists in butter and 

 olive oil, but different from that of the sheep, hog or horse. The 

 former is called margarine, the latter steariue. Oats contain three 

 and a half per cent, of fat; oat straw, five and a quarter per cent. ; 

 wheat, two percent,; and wheat straw, three per cent.; dry 

 clover hay, two per cent.; clover in blossom, four per cent.; 

 Indian corn, eight and three-quarters per cent.; rye, one and 

 three-quarters per cent. If you desire to form one hundred 

 pounds of bone in your animal, it will be necessary to incorporate 

 with her food thirty-six pounds of gelatine, five pounds of car- 

 bonate of lime, four pounds of phosphate of magnesia, one pound 

 of soda, one pound of potash, two pounds of common salt, fifty- 

 five pounds of phosphate of lime. And if you would increase 

 the hair or horns, give at different periods portions of sulphur, 

 amounting in the whole to five pounds. The body extracts all 

 the elements of which it consists, from the food; and if the farmer 

 does not see that it is aiforded in proper proportions and variety,, 



