60 STORRS AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 
for this experiment. Masses of curd put in flasks and steril- 
ized in the autoclave until they seemed almost the texture of 
rubber, became nearly completely soluble in water after four 
to six weeks’ action of either the Camembert or Roquefort mold. 
Experimental cheeses made from time to time with the addition 
of large quantities of ‘‘lactic starter,’’ to exclude other bacteria, 
were inoculated with this mold and carefully kept pure in bell- 
jars. Under favorable conditions such cheeses assumed the 
texture of ripe Camembert cheese in from three to five weeks. 
Repeated analyses have shown that this is approximately the 
same kind of digestion as is found in the ordinary Camembert 
cheese. ‘These pure culture experiments have thus shown that 
this species of mold possesses the ability to change the texture 
of curd to the texture of ripe cheese in the period of time re- 
corded by the makers of such cheese as necessary for the ripen- 
ing of Camembert. 
How, then, is such a result accomplished? Johan Olsen in 
describing the Swedish ‘‘Gammelost’’ declares that ‘‘ He who 
eats Gammelost eats truly more mold than cheese.’’ In other 
words, he believes that in its ripening process the changes are 
due to the complete penetration of the cheese by fungous threads 
which act directly to change its character. Gammelost would 
then be fungus flavored with cheese. But cultural studies and 
careful microscopic examination of hundreds of sections from a 
number of different Camembert cheeses show that our problem 
is very different. In Camembert cheese the mold forms a felted 
mass of hyphae upon the surface and penetrates perhaps one- 
sixteenth of an inch intothe curd. It never reaches even one- 
third of the distance to the center of the cheese, while its spores 
are borne only upon the surface. This, together with a very 
thin outer layer of curd, constitutes the rind of the cheese. 
Further, our experiments referred to above show also that 
on sterile milk the mold forms colonies floating upon the sur- 
face only, while a mass of curd in the bottom of the tube, fully 
two inches away from the nearest fungous thread, may still 
continue to be digested. It is clearly impossible to attribute 
these marked digestive effects at such distances to the direct 
action of the fungous threads upon the medium. From simi- 
larity to other known processes, the presumption arises that 
these are the result of the secretion of enzymes by the mold. 
