70 
Toion Milk. 
is of considerable agricultural ami of very great social con- 
sequence. 
The latter consideration is not sufficiently regarded, for the 
Importance of it can hardly be overrated. " The returns of the 
Registrar-General exhibit a fearful tale of infant mortality ; 
and a large proportion of the various causes of death assigned in 
ihem may be summed up," says Dr. Druitt, Medical Officer of 
Health to St. George's, Hanover-square, "as simply meaning 
starvation." The milk supplied in shops has, in fact, been to 
a large extent deprived of its nutritive elements; and, "little 
more than the thick curd remaining, the delicate stomach of 
a cliild cannot digest it ; and hence diarrhoea, atrophy, and the 
multitudinous diseases which tell so terribly on infant life in 
towns." And not only is there a result of this immediate kind 
contingent on the non-supply of unadulterated milk, but, as 
Mr. Chadwick has pointed out, the health and strength of the 
whole future life are compromised by it. "The foundation of 
the adult is laid in childhood and youth. Oar strongest and 
best labourers are from milk-and-oatmeal fed, or milk-and-bread 
fed, or milk-and-potato-fed children. Our strongest navvies are 
from the hill-districts of Lancashire ; our strongest labourers 
from Cumberland and Westmoreland, and from the hill-districts 
of Scotland, where milk is always a large portion of the food of 
the family. These, too, are the favourite recruiting grounds for 
guardsmen and soldiers of the greatest size and strength." 
If mothers sufficiently realised the future consequences of in- 
sufficient nourishment in infancy, they would be quicker to 
recognise the causes of those ailments which are current during 
the time when this process of imperfect feeding is going on. 
No doubt there are, however, many examples of this quickness ; 
and I met with one the other day in the case of a poor woman 
purchasing a pennyworth of milk in a shop where it has never 
been adulterated or diluted, for which every day she was con- 
tent to walk a mile, saying that it was "four times better" 
than any she could get close by her house ; and the life of 
her child depended on it. The stomach of a child is an 
unquestionable test of the quality of its food ; and she had 
been rightly guided by its indications. But the verdict of the 
analyst may be also trusted ; more confidently perhaps in the 
case of milk than in that of any other food. A mere aroma, 
which the balance of the chemist cannot weigh, may, indeed, 
sometimes destroy the value of milk, as of other food ; but that 
is easily recognisable without analysis : and varieties of mere 
texture, which sometimes upset, as to any practical guidance they 
may offer, the conclusions of the analyst, after he has examined 
other foods, are unknown in the case of milk. Dr. Voelcker's 
