on.

In recent years, due to the advocacy of the eminent scientist,
Metchnikoff, who asserts that researches in the Pasteur Institute have
shown that certain diseases of advanced age are due to auto-intoxication
from the larger intestine and that the consumption of fermented milk
acts as an antiseptic, neutralizing this bacterial intoxication, the
consumption of fermented milk, or buttermilk, or koumiss, has very
largely increased. It is, in fact, rather remarkable to find that in
large cities, business men whose digestions have been ruined are
devoting themselves to unlimited quantities of buttermilk in the hope
that their former excesses and absurdities in the way of food may be
counteracted and health restored.

Between these two extremes--the use of milk for the very young and for
the aged and infirm--milk plays an important part as food. The
consumption of milk in New York State, according to statistics, amounts
to about a pint a day for each person for that part of the country. As
an article of food, milk has the advantage already referred to, namely,
that besides its nutritive power it has a curative effect greatly
augmented by fermentation, the modification so vigorously advocated by
Metchnikoff. Another advantage which milk possesses as an article of
food is that, by sterilization and storage in closed vessels, it may be
kept for days and even months in good condition. At the time of the
Paris Exposition, milk was sent from America and exhibited alongside of
French milk with no preservatives except heat used for removing the
bacteria in the milk and then cold storage for keeping others out, and
two weeks after the original bottling the milk was in good condition. To
meet the need of ailing babies, advantage was taken of this valuable
property of milk, by which it could be shipped from dairies near New
York to the Isthmus of Panama, and used continually with good results
although more than a week old.

_Bacteria in milk._

The great disadvantage which milk sustains as an article of food is that
the same composition that makes it so useful as a diet for man, also
renders it a most admirable culture medium for the rapid development of
all kinds of bacteria. Some of these bacteria are, without doubt, benign
in their effect upon man; as, for example, the particular species used
to produce koumiss and other varieties of fermented milk now recommended
by physicians. But there are many other kinds of bacteria that