MILK A SCAVENGER OF THE COW'S BODY.

Oamaru Mail, Volume I, Issue 228, 15 January 1877, Page 2

MILK A SCAVENGER OF THE COW'S BODY.

It is a fact which must have been noticed by all observing farmers and their families that medicinal agencies, taken into the stomachs of all milk-giving animals, reappear in the milk of such animals. No fact is more notorious than that any medicine—cathartic, emetic, or "alterative — given to a nursing mother affects the child in exactly the same way it does the mother, the medication being carried through the milk of the mother to the stomach of the child in such large proportions as to make the effect upon the child as active as upon the mother. This inclination of the milk-glands to carry off medicinal matter from the body of the milk-giving mother is not an isolated inclination to carry foreign matter from the system. Disease is carried as readily as medicine. Any and every disease which taints the blood, as small-pox, measles, typhoid fever, scrofula, or consumption, are transmitted through milk as readily as the effects of medicine. The excretory power of the milk-glands does not stop with carrying off medicine and disease—it extends to all foreign matter floating in the blood of the milk-producing animals. Nor is this power confined to the milkglands. It belongs to the other glands as well. All the large glands of the body act as scavengers ; but each has a function of its own, to which it is more specially adapted. The liver and kidneys are more active in carrying off foreign and waste mineral matters, while the central glands are more active in ejecting organic substances. The functions, however, run into each other. The oil of turpentine will appear in the secretions of the kidneys in fifteen minutes after being swallowed, and nitrate of potash will about as soon appear, to some extent, in milk as well as in urine. While the milkglands are not very different from other large glands in their general action, their functions have an interest above all others, in a sanitary and economical point of view, because of the part their secretions take in our food and commerce. The essential oils of plants which give them distinctive flavor or odour, as of turnips, onions, &c, the putrid matter in rotten potatoes, decaying grass, and every other food in a state of decomposition, find their way out of the system through milk. I have been witnessing a striking instance of this from feeding the whey of a cheese-factory to the cows furnishing milk for the factory. The whey in the factory was not different from that of other factories. It was one of six factories owned or controlled by one man, under whose personal supervision they were managed. The whey of all factories, as now managed, is stale before it leaves the factory ; incipient decay is started in it, and the cows partaking of it carry the seeds of destruction into their milk, and thence into the cheese. In this instance only a part of the cows supplying milk to the factory used whey; but it was enough to infect the cheese. The curds acted badly and

smelled badly; the cheese puffed and was off flavor, and quite unlike the cheese of the other five factories managed in just the same way, so far as manufacturing was concerned. The quality of cheese was depressed a dollar per 100. The depreciated value brought out a strong remonstrance to feeding whey to the cows, and it was stopped. The effect abated gradually, disappearing with the third day. The cheese of the fourth day became like those made in the other five factories controlled by the same superintendent, demonstrating beyond a doubt that the whey, though very slightly affected, carried into the bodies of the cows the seedf of putrefaction, which were"* 1 ! cast out again in their milk. So with all other fermenting, stale, or decaying food. It is sure to make its impress upon the milk of the cow using it, making it objectionable and unsafe to feed milch cows with any food, or to give thera any water which contains anything that would not be proper to be taken into the human stomach.— Farmers' Advocate.