By C. HUSSON.
M. Meynet, in a remarkable report upon condensed milk, has raised a question which it is important to have solved in the interests of infants. This is my excuse for presenting to the French Society of Hygiene certain observations on this subject.
Is woman's milk richer in fatty matters and sugar in proportion to the caseine than that of the cow? Is the affirmative, sustained by a large number of chemists, a mistake that ought to be corrected?
Such is the question that needs to be answered.
In my last work on milk, my aim was to report new experiments, and hence I gave only the analysis of M. Colawell. By the side of the essays of MM. Doyère, Millon, Commaille, and Wurtz, I put those of Liebig, and quoted an interesting chapter written on this question by M. Caulier, in Dechambre's Encyclopedic Dictionary. These are the authorities upon which to base any opposition to the analyses of Boussingault, Regnault, Littre, and Simon, savants of no less renown.
The differences are easily explained.
Woman's milk is rarely to be had in sufficient abundance to make a complete analysis of it. In the country especially a few precious drops, obtained with difficulty, are carried off in a thimble to be placed under a microscope, where the number of fat globules are counted, and it is examined to see if they are not mixed with globules of colostrum.
It will be necessary at the outset to know whether the analyses given refer to milk drawn from the breast before nursing, or at the end. In the former case there will be an excess of caseine, in the second an excess of fat present. This is the reason that in nursing infants the intervals should not be too long, or the child will not be able to empty the breast completely, and it will obtain a milk too rich in caseine, too poor in butter, and one that it cannot digest.
This is the first proof of the importance of fatty matters for the alimentation of babes.
Let us turn to the second.