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PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY, 
ing the nutritious beverage from its very source. He has found 
these sources poisoned, and has drawn thence the germs of con- 
sumption and of death. Phthisical milk is the punishment of the 
adulteration of milk ; it will disappear from society only when it 
shall become useless to falsify the milk of pastures. Neverthe- 
less, had I the powers of the prefect of police, retaining my 
sound doctrines of Social Hygiene, not a drop of falsified milk 
would be sold in Paris ; not a phthisical cow would have the 
right of an establishment within the walls. 
Perhaps research on this subject would prove that patented 
poisoners — I mean the adulterators of provisions — kill more people 
in ten years than the most murderous wars in a century. In fact, 
wars only kill up the men — they respect woman, who plays an im- 
portant part in the reproduction of the species, as has been proved 
by the cipher of the French population after the great wars of the 
empire. Phthisis, on the contrary, seems to choose its victims, in 
preference, among the sweetest and most adorable types of femi- 
nine beauty — frail, pale, and sensitive — the blonde, most precious 
gift of creation, with which Heaven endowed the pale countries of 
the north, to indemnify them for the absence of the Sun.^ 
* Phthisis does not appear to be so common a form of disease among onr 
distillery-fed city cows in this country, perhaps because they rot too soon 
of more malignant diseases, or die by the butcher’s knife, to furnish our 
markets with tender beef. 
Tied to the rack in crowded stables, which hardly give them room to lie 
down, without ever a breath of pure air for months together from the day 
when they have seen their calves torn from them by the butcher ; they 
drink enormous quantities of warm still slops, morbidly stimulating but 
innutritious, as compared with the ordinary food of the farm. This diet, 
with their confinement in a warm, moist air, reeking with animal effluvia, 
bloats and rots them very rapidly, the legs and the front teeth fii^st fail- 
ing, so that some are dragged out dead nearly every day from the large 
dairy stables, and the milk obtained from them is not only innutritious and 
generally filthy, but so poisonous as to cause cholera morbus and mar- 
asmus in children or animals fed on it, and plays a very important part 
in the inverse providence of cities, by thinning off too numerous families, 
and sowing everywhere the seeds of disease, especially of scrofula, in its 
most disgusting forms. Half the milk used in New York, Brooklyn, and 
Williamsburgh, and an immense am.ount in other cities, comes from the 
whiskey stills, and constitutes their chief source of profit ; showing that civ- 
ilization never does evil in a simple but always in a composite manner. — T r. 
