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103
dence, to which I myself was a party, we had fixed
upon 2.5 as the minimum (standard) for fat in Milk,
Somerset House has fixed upon 2.27 as the standard.
Comparing therefore the standard of Somerset House
with that of the Public Analysts, it will be seen that
the abstraction of cream amounts to 25 percent. or
one quarter. There is now a difference between us
of one quarter, and one half as given by myself.
The rest is altogether a matter of opinion, for no
law obtains which settles the actual amount of degradation
which a milk undergoes in keeping. But, on
the lowest estimate, this would reduce the difference
between us from one quarter to one-third. This
however, is not all, and I may be allowed to quote
from a standard work on the Analysis of Foods, by
A. W. Blyth, the Analyst for the County of Devon,
and Medical Officer of Health for North Devon:
"Some chemists appear to imagine that all milks
decompose according to a fixed ratio. This certainly
is very erroneous, and a supposition entirely unsupported
by facts." And again, "If milk is kept in the
dark, there often occurs slow fermentation, entirely
analogous to the fermentation of cheese" (in which
the per-centage of fat may alter in the course of two
months from 2 to 32 percent.) "in which some