184 
POPULAE SCIENCE EE VIEW. 
higher price for town-shed milk than for country milk is that 
they cannot take off so much cream from milk after having 
been violently agitated during its transmission to town, than 
for the town produce. As far as the consumer is concerned, 
he may therefore, after all, be better served when he is supplied 
with country milk than with the higher priced town- shed 
milk. 
In large towns and all places where the demand for milk at 
times is greater than the supply, its quality is not so good as 
it might be. The inferiority, however, arises simply from a 
deficiency of cream and an extra quantity of water. When 
undiluted and not skimmed, a condition in which milk unfor- 
tunately is rarely retailed by London cow-keepers, town milk, 
I believe, generally is richer in cream and on the whole 
better than country milk. 
This no doubt is due to the fact that London cow-keepers, 
for the most part sharp men of business, are fully alive to the 
advantages of providing a liberal supply of food specially 
adapted to the production of milk rich in fatty matters, 
whilst farmers too frequently overstock their land and hesitate 
to lay out any money in the purchase of bran, oilcake, bean- 
meal, grains, and other food, which would be amply repaid by 
an increased quantity and better quality of milk. 
However, London milk as generally sold to the consumer is 
usually skimmed once and diluted with about 30 per cent, of 
water. A great deal has been said and written about milk- 
adulteration. Sheep's brains, starch paste, chalk, and other 
white substances, which are said — on what authority nobody has 
ever decided — to have been found in milk, only exist in the 
imagination of credulous or half-informed scientific men. It 
is difficult to understand where all the sheep's brains should 
come^from and how they could be amalgamated with milk, 
nor is it at all likely that chalk, a substance insoluble in water 
and not easily kept in suspension, should be employed for 
adulterating milk. As a matter of fact I may state that I 
have examined many hundreds of samples of milk and never 
found any chalk nor any adulterating material except an extra 
quantity of water, and that I never met as yet with a chemist 
who has found any of the clumsy adulterations which popular 
treatises on food describe as having been detected in London 
milk. 
The whole question of milk adulteration and means of 
detecting them, resolves itself into an inquiry into the 
character of good, bad, and watered or skimmed milk, and 
the mode of recognizing these with precision. 
As the result of my own experience, founded on the ex- 
amination of many samples of milk produced under the most 
