INVENTION AND DISCOVERY.
There has lately been patented in England a system for making buttons, combs, brush-handles, billiard balls, and such like articles out of milk.
The bone buttons and articles of that kind, which we have been using up to the present time, have been made of refuse from the slaughter-houses. This new process will only require milk.
Any one who knows anything about dairy work knows what loppered milk is. It is the thick soured milk that one finds under the butter cream.
This loppered milk is made into cottage cheese, and many people, in making their cottage cheese, stand it for a moment on the fire to thicken.
Woe to the dairy wife who lets it stay too long!
It becomes like little knobs of rubber, that nothing will soften. When one tries to bite it one's teeth rebound. It is the toughest kind of material.
Mr. Callander, the Englishman who invented the milk buttons, must have had an encounter with some of this cottage cheese, and his trouble in chewing it must have made him wonder whether it wasn't intended for something else instead of food.
He has found a means of making the loppered milk so solid, that three days after he has mixed it with some ingredients, the secret of which he will not tell, it is like celluloid, and is ready to be cut.
It has a glossy surface, and is of a creamy color.
It is said to be less brittle than bone or celluloid, and not likely to chip. Any one who has eaten cottage cheese that has been too long on the stove will believe that the new substance has powers of resistance that are quite unequalled.