64 STORRS AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 
The culture medium employed was the litmus milk-sugar 
gelatin, whose method of preparation has already been given; 
and the method of using it was that described in the earlier 
paper. 
The milk examined was obtained from each of the milkmen 
who furnish milk to Middletown, about twenty in all. This 
milk was always supposed to be fresh, since it was obtained 
from the milk cart in the early morning, taken immediately to 
the laboratory, and either plated at once or, if there was a de- 
lay of an hour or two, always cooled immediately with ice, so 
that little change could take place in the bacteria content before 
the plates were made. The milk was presumably only a very 
few hours old, since the farms are all close to the city, and the 
milk is delivered to the customer within one to three hours 
after leaving the farm. Some of this milk, however, was morn- 
ing’s milk, and some of it was the milk of the previous evening, 
so that the actual age varied from two hours to twelve hours 
or so. 
As will be seen from tables below, the general character of 
the milk, so far as concerns bacteria, was exceptionally good. 
Middletown is a community of about 15,000 inhabitants, and 
the farms that produce the milk are located in the immediate 
vicinity of the city. Asa rule the producer of the milk is also 
his own distributor, and the milk is put into the hands of cus- 
tomers in a much fresher condition than is possible in our larger 
cities. The highest number of bacteria found in any experiment 
was a trifle over 2,000,000, and this in only one case. In most 
analyses the number was far below this, being rarely as high 
as 100,000, numbers much lower than are found in the ordin- 
ary market milk of large cities. These experiments, therefore, 
while indicating the practical possibility of a qualitative analy- 
sis of milk bacteria in a small community, are as yet incomplete, 
since they do not include any study of the types of milk of the 
poorer character found in our larger cities. The experiments 
described in this series continued over a period of five months, 
beginning in February and extending into June. ‘They there- 
fore include some of the colder months of the winter as well as 
some of the warmer months of the summer. 
The milk in all cases was treated as follows. A sample of the 
ordinary morning’s supply was brought to the laboratory and 


