Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/252

238 of students from the new dairy school was graduated, thus securing for the university two crops from the same land within a year. The building was finished during the summer of 1892, and is a model in appearance and equipment. Its cost up to date with equipment amounts to nearly forty thousand dollars. The name of the building, Hiram Smith Hall, was given it in honor of the veteran Wisconsin dairyman, Hon. Hiram Smith (1890), for twelve years a regent of the University and chairman of the Farm Committee of the Board of Regents, to whose enthusiasm and untiring efforts the school largely owes its existence. The building is calculated to accommodate one hundred students, and this number was reached the first year. Last year one hundred candidates applied for admission before December 1st, although the school did not begin until January 4th, and later applicants had to be turned away. Students have come from Canada and almost every State in the Union where dairying is a leading industry: Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan have furnished their quota; so have Maine and California; New Hampshire and Nevada; New York, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas.

We can not here enter into a detailed description of the courses of instruction offered in the school, but a short outline of the same will be given. Only branches bearing directly on the science and practice of dairying and on the manufacture of dairy products are taught. The policy of the governing board is to make the instruction thoroughly practical; at the same time the theoretical side is considered no less important. The professors and instructors connected with the school are specialists in their various branches; the instructors in the cheese room and the creamery are expert cheese and butter makers.

The instruction is given, first, by lectures; second, by work at the separators, the churns, and the cheese vats, as well as in the laboratory. Lectures are given in the following branches: The breeds and breeding of dairy cows, the feeding of dairy cows, diseases of dairy cows, the chemistry of milk and its products, bacteriology of the dairy products, physical problems connected with the dairy, and the care and management of the boiler and engine. These subjects are presented to the class by different professors of the university.

The practical work is taught in the butter and cheese room, as well as in the laboratory. The picture of the separating room shows the arrangement of the separators. Of these all the latest and most improved patterns are kept, as well as of the butter extractor. It may be in order to state, for the benefit of the many readers who never were inside of a creamery or a farm dairy, that a cream separator or a centrifuge, as it is sometimes called, is a machine for separating the cream from the skim milk by means of