View report page

227
The inferences governing the judgment of the analyst, as to
certificating the sample as adulterated with water or not, depend
upon the nature of the article, upon the customary strengths at
which these various articles are manufactured and sold, and
upon a variety of considerations which vary in every case.
It is easy for the Analyst to determine, within one part in ten
thousand, how much water is contained in 100 grains of any
particular milk. But it may not be easy to demonstrate that an
excess of water, when present, could not have come out of the
cow and must have been added from the pump. In the case of a
sick or exhausted cow, or in the case of a cow fed so as to
produce ready-made milk-and-water, it is obvious that the milk
is nevertheless not of the nature, substance, and quality demanded
by the purchaser. The sale of such milk is therefore a
fraud against which the purchaser ought to be protected. The
question is how to protect the public against the sale of watered
milk without doing a practical injustice to an ignorant vendor.
It must be laid down that a vendor who undertakes to cater
for the public has no excuse for ignorance as to the quality of
the goods he sells. And with many substances, such as milk,
there is no way of shutting out contention upon this point,
except by arbitrarily fixing reasonable standards of quality and
limits to downward variation.
A good average milk should contain 12.5 per cent. (one-eighth
part) of true milk solids. It will be observed in the annexed
table that one milk submitted for analysis (No. 19) contained
1542 per cent. of milk solids ; while other samples showed
downward variations, Avhich, in one case (No. 60), was as low as
9.90 per cent. If we regard 1T5 per cent. of true milk solids
as the limit below which a fairly good milk ought not to fall, the
only question that remains is how to calculate, with fairness
between the vendor and the public, as to the amount of " added
water " which this milk contains. Now, practically, No. 60 was a
separated milk, and the deficiency was chiefly in the fat. It
might be argued for the defence that this was due to mere
accident in the distribution, and that a careless shopman had
so ladled out some of the milk as to give all the cream to the