114 A New Dairy Industry. 



we also find it necessary to give a heavy dose of milk 

 sugar, by which the costs of the manufacture would 

 be greatly enhanced. By some, it has been tried to 

 substitute the cheaper cane sugar, but this has proved 

 a failure on account of its greater propensity to turn 

 acid in the infant's stomach, and because milk sugar 

 possesses special properties of the greatest importance, 

 to ignore which would be equivalent to endangering 

 the reliability of the entire process of turning cow's 

 milk into artificial mothers' milk. The chemical and 

 physiological action of milk sugar on the organism 

 cannot be substituted by either maltose, glucose or 

 cane sugar. To imitate nature — an ever reliable 

 practice in similar cases — has here not proved to be 

 an effective argument, as milk sugar plays but an in- 

 significant part in the customary nourishment of in- 

 fants, while the most unnatural admixtures : the 

 starchy matter contained in so-called infant foods, are 

 frequently resorted to. Sox Met found the absolute 

 necessity of milk sugar to the infant founded on the 

 following differences between it and other sugars : 



1. Excepting cane sugar, which for other reasons 

 cannot be considered, milk sugar is the only kind of 

 sugar which, when heated' with nitric acid, produces 

 slimy acid, while the other sugars produce sugar acid. 



2. Cane sugar, maltose and glucose disintegrate in 

 the presence of common alcoholic ferment into al- 

 cohol and carbonic acid ; milk sugar remains un- 

 changed, and resists to all fermentative influences by 

 far 'more powerfully. 



