177 
ON MILK AND ITS ADULTERATION. 
BY AUGUSTUS VOELCKER, Ph.D., F.C.S., 
PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY TO THE ROYAL AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY OF ENGLAND. 
T HE public is indebted to Mr. J. C. Morton for mucb 
useful and interesting information on tbe production and 
consumption of milk in London. 
Tbe painstaking and intelligent editor of the Agricultural 
Gazette has lately collected, with praiseworthy zeal and self- 
denying labour, a vast amount of statistical facts, having 
reference to the quality of milk produced in London and in 
the country, the quantity annually imported by the metro- 
politan railways, the consumption of milk in London in com- 
parison with that of other towns and of various country 
districts. These facts, together with an account of Mr. 
Morton's numerous visits to the London cow-sheds and 
suburban dairies, and much incidental, interesting informa- 
tion, were brought before the Society of Arts last December, 
in a paper on London milk, which was subsequently published 
in the J ournal of the Society. This paper will well repay a 
careful perusal, for it contains a great deal of valuable and 
trustworthy information on a variety of matters important to 
the producer and consumer of milk. 
It is not, however, my intention to review Mr. Morton's 
paper in detail, or to present the necessarily dry statistical 
data in which it abounds, in a shape in which they may be 
offered to the general reader with a fair chance of being read 
and inwardly digested. 
The main object of the present paper is to give a short 
account of the chemical and physical character of good, bad, 
indifferent, and adulterated milk, and of a ready means of 
ascertaining, with at least some degree of accuracy, the 
extent of adulteration to which milk is frequently subjected, 
more particularly in London and other large towns. 
When Mr. Morton's paper was read before the Society of 
Arts, the discussion that followed the reading of it chiefly 
