60 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



We shall have reason to return to this important 

 subject of the relation of milk to the digestive system, 

 but for the present it is enough to note the fact that 

 goat's milk is rather harder in curd than cow's milk, 

 and that both are very different to woman's milk 

 in that respect, taxing the digestive organs accord- 

 ingly- 



To offset the slight inferiority to cow's milk due to 

 the harder and tougher curd, Dr. J. Finley Bell has 

 shown that goat's milk has other advantages." Not 

 only is the milk much less subject to bacterial con- 

 tamination, but the fat in it, while the percentage is 

 higher than in cow's milk, seems to be much more 

 nearly akin to the fat in human milk than is that 

 contained in cow's milk. As a result of the success 

 which attended the use of goat's milk in cases of 

 infantile diseases of the digestive tract, after cow's 

 milk had failed, Dr. Bell undertook an investigation 

 into the subject of the relative digestibility of the 

 milk of cows and goats. He found that the milk 

 fat of the two species differed from each other and 

 from that of the human species in that they melted 

 at quite different temperatures. The temperature 

 at which the fat of goat's milk melted was much 

 nearer to the melting-point of human milk fat than 

 the melting-point of the bovine milk fat. The 

 temperature (centigrade) at which each melted was : 

 human, 36.5°; goat, 34.5° to 36.0°; cow, 38.0° to 



