Butter can be obtained from cream, when sweet and newly taken from the milk ; but it then requires, accord ing to Fourcroy, four times as much churning as after it has become sour by standing. It appears, therefore, that by being kept, cream acquires new properties, in conse quence of which, it can be with greater facility converted into butter. This can by no means be equally well ob tained from the milk of every sort of animal. Indeed, the milk of some of them can never be made to yield any butter. No length of churning will produce it from the cream of woman's milk, or of mare's milk ; while, on the contrary, the cream of goat's milk, and ewe's milk, yield it in abundance, and with as much facility as the cream of the milk of the cow, from which it is almost always made. The cream of asses milk, when long agitated, yields a soft, white, insipid butter, which has the singu lar property of again mixing very readily with the butter milk, and of being capable to be again separated from it, by agitating the containing vessel under cold water.
When butter is kept for a certain time, it acquires a peculiar disagreeable smell and taste, known by the name of rancidity. This has been thought to arise from the developement of a peculiar acid, similar to, if not the same with, the sebacic acid. But Deyeux and Parmen tier have shewn, that no acid is present in rancid butter. Rancid oils, however, certainly do spew acid properties. The disposition of butter to become rancid, is owing in a good measure to the presence of foreign matters adher ing to it ; for if the butter be carefully washed, so as to separate completely the serous and curdy parts, rancidi ty does not take place nearly so soon.
When butter is distilled, we obtain a little water and sebacic acid ; the greatest part of the butter comes over in the state of an oil, with a strong, pungent, and very dis agreeable smell ; much carburated hydrogen gas is dis engaged, and there remains in the retort a very small carbonaceous residuum, with a little phosphat of lime.
The most approved modes of preparing butter, the circumstances which influence its goodness, the uses to which it is put, and the best methods of preserving it, with its importance as an article of commerce, will be mentioned afterwards. Meanwhile, we observe, that this substance seems to have been very imperfectly, if at all, known to the ancients.
The word butter is no doubt from the Latin butyrum, and that from the Greek (387veov, which is generally stat ed to be a compound of the two words 1385, bos, and 7veoc, coagulum ; while others contend that pi7veov is not of Greek origin, but derived from the language of the Scythians, from whom the Greeks first obtained the knowledge of butter. Certain it is, that Hippocrates is the first Greek author who mentions Ps7veov. Speaking of the Scythians, he says, " they pour the milk of their mares into wooden vessels and shake it violently ; this causes it to foam, and the fat part, which is light, rising to the surface, becomes what they tail butter (34:Toy zcoas7r)" Ilerodoms also, who was cotempnr<•y with him from the year IL C. 459 to 13. C. 413, particularly describes the process of making butter among the Scy thians. This affords a presumption that the article was not then known among the (;reeks, and that they acquir •d the knowledge of psiveov, and the practice of making it, from the Scythians.
Some lure imagined that they found butter mentioned in the writings of Moses, the book of Job, and other parts of the most ancient sacred scriptures. According to our
translation, Abraham is said, Gen. xviii. 8. to have taken butter and milk, and the calf that had been dressed, to set before the august strangers who visited him. And in the well-known song, or historical ode of Moses, which he recited in the hearing of the Israelites, a short time before his death, (Dem. xxxii. 14.) we have the words " butter of kine." Butter is also mentioned in the song of Deborah and Barak, Judges v. 25. Certain friends (2 Sam. xvii. 29.) are said to have brought to Maha naim, butter and other articles, for the refreshment of David and his army during the rebellion of his son Ab salom. Honey and butter are also mentioned Job xx. 17 ; and in chap. xxix. 6. he says, " When I washed my steps with butter, and the rock poured me out rivers of oil." Butter and honey are also mentioned in the well known passage in the 7th chapter of Isaiah, where the prophet foretels of the child, that he should eat butter and honey. And in the Soth chapter of the Proverbs it is said, the churning of milk bringeth forth butter." But it is to be observed, that in all these passages, the He brew word is rumn, hemae, which biblical critics agree in allowing to signify sour thick milk or cream. Be sides, it is plain that hemiie alludes to something fluid, for it was used to wash the feet. The error of suppos ing hemde to mean a concrete substance like butter, ap pears to have arisen from the Septuagint, who translate the Hebrew term by pi/veoy, a word which, as they lived in Egypt two centuries after Hippocrates, they might no doubt have heard of, and supposed to correspond to the Hebrew word hemde. That they meant, however, no more than cream by the term 13117veay, is highly probable. No doubt, the common translation of the passage alrea dy quoted from the Proverbs, may be thought to prove clearly that the making of butter by churning was well known among the Hebrews. But the original words thrl nzeetz heleb, signify to squeeze or press ; and might. have been as well translated " the pressing of the milker bringeth forth milk." And this accords better with what immediately follows, V?Z. " and the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood." It was late before the Greeks•appear to have had any knowledge of butter. No mention is made of it by any of their early poets. Homer, Theocritus, and Euripides, though they frequently speak of milk and cheese, say nothing of butter : and Aristotle, in his History of ?ni mats, at first assigns to milk only two component parts, viz. the serous and the caseous ; though afterwards he re marks, as it were by the bye, that there is likewise found in milk a fat substance, which, under certain circum stances, is like oil. Hippocrates, as we have alrez dy re marked, is the first. Greek writer who mentions butter ; and he frequently prescribes it as an external application under another name, viz. vroafroy. Rut Galen, who wrote in the end of the second century, does not use this tern). it seems to have been of Phrygian extraction. The poet Anaxandrides, who flourished a short time af ter Hippocrates, describing the wedding of 1phicrates. who married the daughter of Cotys king of Thrace, and the Thracian entertainments given on that occasion, men tions the use of butter for food among these people as a matter of curiosity; a sure proof that it was not so em ployed among the Greeks.