back, "Your butter is badly off; can't get full price," and they begin to wonder why, and they say "We have done everything just as usual, haven't changed a thing." They have been carrying along these germs until it gets to the point where it simply ruins the taste of the butter. Just remember it is the growth of these little plants that did the work, nothing else.

When it comes to the manufacture of butter, if you ask the people of the northwest, who are making a great success of butter making, and who have distanced us in the east, how they have managed, you will find that they have commenced with the farmers. They have impressed upon them the necessity of cleanliness, and they keep their milk in good condition. That is why these people are succeeding in this business. If they use a starter they have it prepared either from carefully skimmed milk, or by the use of one of the commercial starter preparations, and when they have put that in the cream and have ripened it, they have developed the kind of flavor they want.

This afternoon I will show you something of the results of a starter in the making of cheese.

Last fall I went down in Chenango county, where they have been carrying on private dairying for a long time. Some of the dairymen there are making up butter for special customers, and they have made a great success of it. I scored the butter, and it was uniformly very good indeed. I had a little talk with them, and it appeared that these people, through the demands of their private customers, had become educated to this point of keeping everything about their dairies clean, and studying the best methods of manufacturing. The result was a very high standard of butter, and they are getting good prices.

The farmer, if he does these things, has the advantage of the creamery man, for he has only his individual conditions to control, and he can control them very much better than can the creamery man, with forty or fifty dairies. We can sum up

the whole matter of making good butter and cheese in these few words: cleanliness and careful attention to the little details. If you will mind these things you will make good butter. If you neglect any of them you will have poor butter as a result.

QUESTIONS.

Question. What is the nature of a starter?

Answer. The nature of a starter is to get a clean culture of lactic acid germs. It doesn't make so much difference how you do it, if it is only a pure culture. Prof. Harding, the bacteriologist at the Geneva Station, secured a culture that would produce good, clean lactic acid and would not produce

gas. He took some of these germs that he had and put into a little sterilized skim milk which had been heated to 190° F. with hot water around it. He kept it in a closed can for an hour and a half and then cooled it down to 70°, added the germs and let it develop. The next day it was a nice clean sour, not hard. It should not be hard and crumbly, but must be soft, just nicely thickened, and to the taste a nice clean sour. Of course, you can get the same thing by using either of the different commercial powders, and make a culture in the same way, putting the powder into the sterilized skim milk and allowing it to develop, and then taking a small amount of that to put into your next sterilized skim milk, and carrying it along in that way.

Question.-Do you recommend its use?

Answer. I do most emphatically recommend a starter. Question. What is it for?

Answer. When your wife starts her sponge to make bread she puts in yeast, doesn't she? It is on the same principle that we use the starter in the cream. If she did not use the yeast she would not have light, sweet bread. If she trusts to luck to raise the sponge she will not have very good bread. You do the same thing when you set your cream, not quite as strong as that perhaps, but it is on the same principle. When you set your cream with no starter you trust to luck to get what you want. Perhaps you will get it and perhaps you wont. One thing you must remember, if you have 1,000 lactic acid plants and 1,200 gas producing plants, the 1,200 plants are the ones that are going to carry the day. But if you have

more lactic acid than gas then the lactic acid will carry the day, and if you have more gas you will get the after effects in that old greasy smell. I don't think there is anyone who is succeeding in making that high, fine flavor of butter every day, right straight along, but that he is using a starter. The market requires a uniform butter all the time. It can't be good one day and bad the next. When you put the properly prepared starter into the cream under good conditions, it means that you will have good butter every day.

Question. Do creameries generally use the Babcock test? Answer.-Most of the creameries in New York State pay for the milk on the basis of the Babcock test. Not all of them, but a very large proportion of them do.

Question. How often would a new powder have to be introduced in a starter in making 700 pounds of butter a day?

Answer. You can carry a starter three or four months if you are careful. I have carried it five months at the Station, having made my conditions perfect.

Question. I have an ordinary creamery, and have a great deal of milk and cream that is brought, many days, in an all but sour condition. In such cases as that is a starter of any use whatever?

Answer. Why, of course, if you have so much acid in the cream when it comes that will be a starter, and you don't need any more. But I don't believe it is possible to make a high grade of butter under these conditions.

Question. To use a starter in that case, would the failure in the quality of the butter come from the starter or from the original milk?

Answer. In such a case the fermentations produced by the germs already there, having gone so far, it is impossible to counteract the influences they have produced.

Question. Isn't it necessary to have a few bacteria in the milk?

Answer. Certainly, we have got to have them, but we don't want the wrong kind. Let me illustrate. I go into your barn, throw down some hay, stir it around and get the hay dust all over your barn. Then if I take a gelatine plate and wave it around I will catch some of these germs. The chances are that I will catch one that is called the hay bacilli. These germs will make the milk putrid in a short time. Don't you see if you have these conditions in your barn, it is almost impossible to make fine butter. When they used to keep their cows in the pasture and milk them in the yard, never putting them in the barn, then they had very much better conditions. The stables should be kept clean. In certain sections of New York State they compel the farmers to keep their barns swept down and the stables whitewashed thoroughly. Do everything you can to make the stables as sanitary as possible. Use plaster to keep down the ammonia, etc.

Question. Would you advise the average dairyman to use a starter?

Answer. Yes, sir; I would. In every case that I know of where the private dairyman is using a starter they are making very fine butter.

Question. Do you consider it practical for the average creamery man not to renew his starter but once in three or four months?

Answer.-Probably not. Just as soon as he gets these adverse conditions in it he must throw it away and begin all over. Any careful butter maker can tell how often it is necessary to make a new starter.

I saw a thing the other day that I believe is going to be generally adopted in every creamery where they are making butter, and that was pasteurization. I saw a sample of pasteurized butter, and also a sample of the same man's butter made a week before, not pasteurized. The first was three days old and the latter a week old. The difference between those two samples was simply marvelous. There was a perfectly clean, nice flavor in the pasteurized butter, and in the other there was a little of that winter flavor, barn flavor, so difficult to get rid of where you are making winter butter. Of

course, if you pasteurize your milk you must use a starter. You have destroyed the germs and can't ripen the cream without it. This gives an opportunity to put in just the kind you want.

Question.-Will you describe the method of pasteurization that should be used by the ordinary creamery man?

Answer. The ordinary system that is used in the State of New York is what is known as continuous pasteurization. The inside can where the milk is heated has an outside jacket with steam around it. In most cases it is a flaring copper cylinder, largest at the top, with a geared fan arrangement to keep the milk working towards the top. The one we use is an improved Danish machine, and we can pasteurize 2,500 pounds of milk an hour. In ordinary creamery work heating the milk to 156° to 160° F. is the usual temperature. We have heated it to 185° F., but you get a cooked taste, unless you cool it very quickly after that.

Question. What about the flavor of pasteurized milk? Answer.-Milk pasteurized at 155° F. does not change the flavor materially, when it is cooled immediately.

BACTERIOLOGY OF MILK-FACTS CONCERNING ITS RELATION TO PUBLIC HYGIENE.

B. H. STONE, A. B., M. D., Bacteriologist, Laboratory of Hygiene.

Bacteria are the lowest form of vegetable life-unicellular plants so small that many thousands of them placed end to end would extend only a fraction of an inch, and many billions of them would weigh but a small fraction of an ounce.

To make them visible, they require the magnification of a microscope so powerful that if it could be applied to him, would make a man look about four times as large as Mount Washington, yet their effects are as far reaching as any agency we know. They are everywhere present and require only warmth, moisture, oxygen and a certain amount of organic matter for their activities.

When conditions are favorable, they may increase in numbers to a degree which is limited only by their surroundings. A little constriction appears around one of the germs; it grows a little longer; a partition forms across the middle and in place of one there are two full-fledged bacteria.

So rapid is this reproduction that a single germ, by its process of growth and subdivision, may give rise to sixteen and a half millions similar organisms within twenty-four hours.

It has been calculated by an eminent biologist that if proper conditions could be maintained a little rod-shaped bacterium which would measure less than one-thousandth of an inch, multiplying in this way, would in five days make a mass which would completely fill as much space as is occupied by all the oceans, supposing them to have an average depth of one mile. Fortunately, however, the struggle for existence is as fierce in the microscopic world as elsewhere, and we are safe from such a dire calamity.

Milk forms an excellent food for nearly all forms of bacteria. Here they find the oxygen and organic matter, the moisture and warmth, and are protected from the light which is inimical to them by the opacity of the fluid. From these facts it is but natural that we find an immense number of these organisms in milk, especially after it has been drawn for any considerable time. There may be from a few hundred to many millions in a single drop, depending upon a number of factors, including exposure, temperature, etc. Dirt in milk