180 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
In the spring of the year, and the early part of summer, 
milk is more abundant, and the butter made from it of a finer 
flavour. As the season advances, the supply diminishes, but 
becomes richer in butter. The influence of food on the quality 
of milk is very striking. A half-starved cow not only yields 
but little milk, but what it yields is miserably poor. On the 
other hand, the liberal supply of food, rich in nitrogenous 
and phosphatic elements of nutrition, tells directly on the 
milk. 
Nothing, therefore, can be more injudicious than to stint 
dairy cows in food. 
The finest flavoured milk and butter, I need hardly say, are 
produced by cows fed in summer entirely on the grass of rich 
permanent pastures, and in winter on nothing else but hay 
made of fine short sweet grass. Eleven or twelve lb. of grass 
produce about one lb. of milk, or a ton of good hay produces 
as nearly as possible one hundred gallons of milk. Few persons, 
however, having the opportunity of keeping cows for their 
own use, can afford to feed them in winter entirely upon hay. 
Turnips, mangolds, meal, brewer's grain, bran, or oil-cake, 
with more or less straw- chaff, in a great measure have to take 
the place of hay as a winter food. 
Turnips give a disagreeable taste to the milk, and more- 
over produce very watery milk. 
Mangolds are less objectionable, but should not be given to 
milk-cows without an allowance of three to five pounds of 
meal. Of all kinds of meal, none is equal in milk-producing 
qualities to bean-meal — a fact which finds a ready explanation 
in the circumstance that bean-meal contains as much as twenty- 
eight per cent, of flesh-forming matters, or the same class 
of compounds to which the curd and albumen of milk belong, 
and that it is also rich in phosphates, or bone-earth. Pea- 
meal or Egyptian lentils closely resemble bean-meal in com- 
position, and may be used with equal advantage as an auxiliary 
and excellent food for milk-cows. It is not a little remarkable 
that in leguminous seeds, which are always rich in flesh- 
forming matters as well as in other articles of food, a large 
percentage of nitrogenous or flesh-forming compounds usually 
is associated with a large percentage of phosphates or bone- 
earth. There exists thus naturally an admirable provision in 
food, specially adapted for milk-cows, or young and growing 
stock, to supply the animal not only with the material of 
which the*curd of milk or the flesh of young stock consist, but 
likewise to supply bone materials, for which there is great 
demand when growingstock has to be maintained in a thriving* 
state, or cows have to be kept in a condition in which they 
may be expected to yield much and good milk. Oil-cake 
