THE MILK QUESTION.*
SIR WALTER GILBET, who has published a number of practical books on rural subjects, is a great believer in milk, and he is afraid that " milk scares " and the promised Local Government Board legislation may have the effect of limiting the consumption of it. Hence this pamphlet.. Its author is as much opposed to sterilised milk as t.i "condensed" milk. Sterilisation, the London and Leith Committees re- ported, destroys the enzyme in the milk. The case against "condensed" milk is that it is not wholly milk. One sample contained as much as thirty-seven per cent. of beet-sugar. It is, of course, the sugared condition of the condensed milk which keeps it fresh longer than new milk,—a great point in its favour, as well as its cheapness, in the opinion of the poor: About £3,000,000 worth of condensed • milk is imported annually, and one condensed milk fir m in England, with five factories, buys every year the milk of thirty thousand cows.- Lord Carrington lately stated that the quantity of milk drunk in this country is increasing at the rate of six million gallons a year. Sir Walter would like to see the rate accelerated. One of the largest milk contractors in London is quoted as asserting that the daily outlay on milk in the Metropolis does not average more than three-halfpence per family of four. The number of cows in milk in Great Britain exceeds two millions, but Sir Walter wants the number considerably added to or the quality of the. animals raised. The average milk-yield per cow in a year in this country has been put by one authority at only three hundred gallons, and by another at four hundred and eighty gallons. The remark- able results obtained .by English, Continental, and American cowkeepers who bleed for milk and butter, instead of trying to get large yields from animals bred to attract the eye of the butcher, show how these figures can be improved upon. A Danish Co-operative Society, possessing twelve herds, has increased the yield per cow sixty gallons all round in six. years. Sir Walter, like other students of the milk question, desires to encourage the supply of milk in bottles direct from the farms. He writes with common-sense on the value of fresh air for cows, not only in their houses, but in the open in the winter. Keep the cows in good health, he argues, and their need be little fear of tuberculosis. He believes that the danger to the public, from the milk-supply is exaggerated. One of his arguments is that while milk drinking is in- creasing, the .number of persons affected by tuberculosis is decreasing. He lays stress on the fact that, of a hundred and forty. thousand carcases of calves from one to six months old reported upon by the City of London veterinary inspector, less than one-tenth of one per cent. was affected with tuberculosis. He draws attention to the statement of the London Hospitals Committee that in the matter of milk " there is little practical utility in bacteriological tests." He thinks that it should be more widely known that "disease of the udder seldom occurs." Sir Walter must give confidence to milk-consumers. In the experience of the present writer, however, practical farmers do not deny the prevalence of tuberculosis among cows, and a medical weekly before us speaks of "tubercle bacilli from animal sources constituting a menace to mankind." Attention is given by Sir Walter Gilley to the value of goat and ewe milk. On an Argentine ranch there are thirteen thousand Lincoln ewes kept to produce milk for cheese-making. Some Syrian ewes in Essex yield about three or four pints of milk a day.
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