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The Care of Babies: Carefully

To test milk for dirt place a goodsized button in the bottom of an ordinary tin funnel and upon this a piece of dampened absorbent cotton about the size of a twenty-five cent piece and about one-sixteenth of an inch in thickness. Carefully pour the entire contents of the milk bottle into this funnel and let it filter. The cotton will catch every particle of sediment or dirt which the milk may contain. Remove the cotton and place it upon a piece of white paper near the stove to dry. If much dirt is shown, ask your milkman to take a look at it. Or, if you live in a city mail it, with a complaint, to the Board of Health.

The danger to health from dirty methods of keeping and milking cows, dirty milkers and dirty milk vessels increases with every moment milk is allowed to stand in a temperature over 40° or 45° F. Injurious spores and bacteria remain dormant or increase very slowly at lower temperatures, but as the temperature rises up to 60° or 70° F., or thereabouts, they develop and multiply with astonishing rapidity. A bottle of dirty milk standing in the sun for an hour or two in the early morning may breed millions of injurious bacteria and become totally unfit for human food.

The feeding of cow's milk to infants, to be at all safe, entails the following tedious and never-ending operations: Securing fresh milk every day; home pasteurization; sterilization of all milk containers including boiling of feeding bottles, nipples, etc., for each and every feeding; refrigeration-storage in scrupu- 1 lously clean ice boxes - and milk modification, all to be carefully performed and varied according to age or condition of the child.

Even if the milk is clean, fresh and cool when it is delivered at your door, or if you then kill the germs which it may contain by home pasteurization, it may afterwards become unfit for food, especially for babies, by improper treatment. This may occur if you place it in unclean vessels, expose it unnecessarily to the air, or fail to keep it cool up to the time of using it. Hence the following suggestions. Buy bottled milk, at least for your baby, if you can. Keep milk in the original bottle till needed for immediate consumption. Carefully wipe or rinse the bottle, especially the mouth, before pouring any milk from it, so that dust or dirt which may have gathered thereon or on the cap will not get into the milk. Do not pour back into the bottle milk which has been exposed to the air by being placed in other vessels. Keep the bottle covered with a paper cap as long as milk is in it and when not actually pouring from it. If the paper cap has been punctured, cover the bottle with an inverted tumbler.

The sanitary containers that are used but once and then destroyed are preferable to those of glass, but the consumer seems to object to them because, not being transparent, no cream line can be seen. When their value from a health standpoint is understood the sanitary containers will be universally adopted as they already have been in some cities.

Dipping milk from large cans and pouring it into customers' receptacles on the street, expose it to contamination from the air and otherwise. Drawing milk from the faucet of a retailer's can is objectionable for another reason. The milk is not thoroughly mixed. Hence some consumers receive less than their due proportion of cream. But if you must buy dipped milk, do not set out over night an uncovered vessel to receive it. Cats, dogs or tramps may contaminate the milk by drinking from it. At best it will collect thousands of bacteria from street dust before morning. Have the milk received by some member of the family if possible, or set out a bowl covered with a plate, or better still, provide yourself with several glass preserving jars kept for this special purpose.

Use jars with the clamp glass top.

Avoid the screw tops. Omit the rubber band. They are difficult to keep clean. Do not use a pitcher. It cannot be tightly covered on account of the projecting spout.

Take the milk into the house as soon as possible after delivery, particularly in hot weather. Sometimes milk delivered as early as 4 a. m. remains outdoors until 9 or 10 o'clock. This is wrong. If you cannot receive the milk as soon as delivered provide a small wooden box or other shelter to protect it from the sun and insist that the milkman use it.

The best way of serving milk on the table, from a sanitary standpoint, is in the bottle or fruit jar in which it is received. At all events, pour out only what is needed for immediate use and keep the rest in the original receptacle. Never pour the milk into a bowl or pitcher for storage, nor pour back into the bottle or jar milk which has been exposed to the air. In fact, do not mix milk -the mixture always descends to the quality of its worst part. Milk deteriorates by exposure to the air of the nursery, kitchen, pantry or refrigerator in two ways: by contamination from germs and by absorption of odors. Cover milk when not actually pouring from it by turning over the jar or bottle a small bowl or tumbler, or use a cork or cap of sterilized gauze or cotton wool, both of which are germ-proof.

Never expose uncovered milk in a refrigerator containing any kind of food, especially strong-smelling foods like fish, cabbage or onions.

Milk cannot be properly kept with- THE CARE OF BABIES nothing as compared with the cost of sickness and death.

Or, get a box about 18 inches square from your grocer, take the boards off the top and cleat them together to form a lid. Tack to the out ice. If you have a refrigerator put the milk into it promptly. Unless it comes into actual contact with the ice, it will keep best in the bottom of the ice box. The cold air descends. If you can get ice but have no refrigerator, you can make a cheap ice box that can be operated for less than three cents a day in which to preserve a baby's milk, as S: follows:

A Cheap Ice Box. -Secure an ordinary wooden box, 13 by 18 inches, with a depth of 11½ inches, from your grocer. In the bottom of the box place a substantial layer of sawdust. On this set a tin pail or can, 8 inches in diameter and high enough to hold a quart bottle of milk. Care should be taken that the pail rests on sawdust not on the wood bottom of the box. Around the pail place a cylinder of tin a little larger than the pail, then pack sawdust about the cylinder-not between pail and cylinder-up to top of the cylinder.