CHAPTER I 



THE CHEMICAL AND CELLULAR CONTENT OF GOW'S MILK 



Milk is the secretion of a living animal, and as such is highly 

 complex in nature and liable to variation in its composition, 

 facts which must always be kept in miud in dealing with 

 its chemical, bacteriological, and physiological properties. 

 No artificial mixture of chemical substances, even in the 

 exact proportions in which they occur in milk, will yield 

 milk. It has constituents and properties beyond the merely 

 chemical. 



Chemically it is essentially a mixture of proteids, milk 

 sugar and salts dissolved in water, and holding in suspension 

 fat in the form of finely divided globules. 



Wynter Blythe ^ gives the average composition of healthy 

 cows' milk as follows : 



Milk lat 



Casein 

 Albumen 

 Milk sugar 



Butyrin 



Caproiii 



Caprylin 



Capiin 



Laurin . 



Myristicin 



Palmitin 



Stearin . 



Olein 



Part.-> per 

 cent by 

 weight. 



0-15 ^ 



0-14 

 0-02 

 0-07 

 0-29 

 0-79 

 1-00 

 0-07 

 1-37 



3-90 



3-00 

 0-40 

 4-75 



1 Foods : their Composition and Analysis, 1909, p. 204. 



