and the statement that it is the greatest peril to modern civilization has a basis in actual experience. It appears to be a conclusion, which all scientific and sociological progress is verifying, that a more complete knowledge of alcohol will demand some form of prohibitory laws; whether like those existing at present or not it is impossible now to say. Such laws will not depend on any sentiment or any theory, but will be founded on demonstrated truths, and the necessity for self-preservation. It will not be a question of Maine law, or whether prohibition prohibits, or whether any party or society or public sentiment favors or opposes it. Action will be taken on the same principle that a foul water supply is cleansed or a sanitary nuisance removed. The questions of high or low license, local option, and all the various schemes of partial or complete restriction, with the vast machinery of moral forces that seek relief by the church, the pledge, the prayer, and the temperance society, will be forgotten, and the evil will be dealt with in the summary way in which enlightened communities deal with other ascertained causes of dangerous disease. While the average citizen may be slow to unlearn and change his views about alcohol, he is ever quick to recognize and provide for dangers that peril his personal interests. Show this man that every place where spirits are sold as a beverage is a "poison center" and every drinker is a suicidal maniac, whose presence is dangerous to the happiness and peace of the community, and he will at once become a practical prohibitionist. This is the direction toward which all temperance agitation is drifting. Sanitary boards, government commissions, and hospital authorities must gather the facts from very wide sources, and the generalizations from these will supplement and sustain the laboratory and hospital work and point out conclusions that will be real advances in this field. Inebriate asylums (at present obscure and bitterly opposed) will become very important aids in the study of the causes of inebriety. Like prohibitory laws, they will become a recognized necessity when the disease of inebriety and the poison of alcohol are understood. Beyond all theory and agitation there is another movement of startling significance. Everywhere the moderate and excessive drinking man is looked upon with suspicion. His capacity is doubted, and his weakness is recognized as dangerous in all positions of trust and confidence. Corporations and companies demand employees to be total abstainers. Railroads, manufactories, and even retail liquor dealers of the better class require all workmen. to be temperate men. This is extending to all occupations, and the moderate drinker is being crowded out as dangerous and unfit. This movement has no sentiment, but is the result of experi VOL. XLV.-19 ence and the recognition of the danger of the use of alcohol as a beverage. Nothing can be more absolute than these unwritten prohibitory laws which discharge workmen seen in saloons and refuse to employ skilled men because they use spirits in moderation. To repeal all restrictive and prohibitory laws and open the doors for the free use of rum is to act in opposition to all the facts of observation and experience. On the other hand, to insist that prohibitory laws are the only measures to correct the drink evils, or that high license and local option are equally powerful as remedies, is to assume a knowledge of alcohol and inebriety that has not been attained. The highest wisdom of to-day demands the facts and reasons for the use of alcohol, and why it should be literally and theoretically the cause of so much loss. and peril to the race. All hope for the future solution of these questions must come from accurately observed facts and their teachings, and, like the problems of the stars above us, be determined along lines of scientific inquiry. DAIRY SCHOOLS AND DAIRY PRODUCTS. BY F. W. WOLL, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. Ε VERYBODY likes good butter and good cheese, but to a large proportion of our population these very desirable articles of food would come in under the head of luxuries. Perhaps more than ninety per cent of the butter consumed by our people is made on farms or in private dairies; a great deal of it is fit for a king's table, and more and more of this kind of butter is made every year; still, when we consider the number of small towns in the United States and the quality of the mass of butter which every week is brought to the corner grocery store in each one of these places, there to be exchanged for three cent calico or twentyfive-cent coffee, it is evident that a large proportion of our butter is unqualifiedly bad. As for much of the cheese sold, the trouble lies in another direction-less in faulty methods of manufacture than in a flooding of the market with an immature, indigestible, sole-leather product, which some of us may know from the dining rooms of second and third class hotels. While we, therefore, may find fault with a large share of the dairy products sold in the United States, we can not wonder very much that such is the case. Not until of late years has thorough, systematic instruction in their manufacture been offered anywhere in this country. The fundamental principles of the handling and care of milk and cream, and of the cream and butter in and out of the churn, are almost unknown to thousands of butter-makers, and more especially to the private, non-professional ones among these, who are in the great majority. The engineers have their mechanical colleges and their schools of technology, the doctors have their medical schools, and the druggists their pharmacy colleges, but the dairy farmers have had practically no place where they could receive instruction in the theory and practice of butter and cheese making. I am aware that there have been agricultural colleges in the United States since 1855, but as far as practical instruction in dairying is concerned a good many of them might as well not have existed at all, if I do not radically misjudge the situation. Lectures in dairying, in which the principles of butter-making were to be taught, were certainly included in the curricula of some of the colleges, under the charge of the Professor of Agriculture, but this gentleman most likely also had charge of the feeding and breeding of farm animals, cultivation of crops, soil physics, farm management, and other studies. It is not strange that the attention given to dairy matters and to the manufacture of dairy products could only be very scant under these conditions. There were so many important problems to be taken up and discussed in relation to general agricultural topics that time would not permit entering into details, even if the professor had the inclination to do so. This state of affairs led to the establishment of separate schools for instruction in dairying, especially in the manufacture of butter and cheese. Such schools have existed in Europe for a number of years; here they were not introduced until four years ago, when the Wisconsin Dairy School was founded as a separate department of the Agricultural College of the University of Wisconsin. So spontaneous was the growth of this school, and so rapid the adoption of the system in many other States of the Union, that it surprised the most ardent supporters of the movement. The Wisconsin Dairy School dates from January, 1890, when a short dairy course was arranged for students taking the winter course in the College of Agriculture; two out of the twenty-seven agricultural students took this dairy course. The following year, when the course was greatly widened and the dairy school proper organized, seventy-two students entered, crowding the quarters of the school to the very utmost. The Wisconsin Legislature having in 1891 appropriated twenty-five thousand dollars for a separate dairy-school building, the work was at once pushed forward; where a crop of corn was taken off the ground in September, 1891, a neat, substantial edifice was erected, the first story of which was ready for occupancy in January, 1892, and in March the first class |