MILKING.--The manner of milking exerts a more powerful and lasting influence on the productiveness of the cow than most farmers are aware of. That a slow and careless milker soon dries up the best of cows, every practical farmer and dairyman knows; but a careful examination of the beautiful structure of the udder will serve further to explain the proper mode of milking, to obtain and keep up the largest yield. “The udder of a cow,” says a writer in the Rural Cyclopædia, “is a unique mass, composed of _two_ symmetrical parts, simply united to each other by a cellular tissue, lax, and very abundant; and each of these parts comprises two divisions or quarters, which consist of many small granules, and are connected together by a compact laminous tissue; and from each quarter proceed systems of ducts, which form successive unions and confluences, somewhat in the manner of the many affluents of a large river, until they terminate in one grand excretory canal, which passes down through the elongated mammillary body called the teat. Its lactiferous or milk tubes, however, do not, as might be supposed, proceed exactly from smaller to larger ducts by a gradual and regular enlargement, because it would not have been proper that the secretion of milk should escape as it was formed; and therefore we find an apparatus adapted for the purpose of retaining it for a proper time. This apparatus is to be found both in the teat and in the internal construction of the udder. The teat resembles a funnel in shape, and somewhat in office; and it is possessed of a considerable degree of elasticity. It seems formed principally of the cutis, with some muscular fibres, and it is covered on the outside by cuticle, like every other part of the body; but the cuticle here not only covers the exterior, but also turns upwards, and lines the inside of the extremity of the teat, as far as it is contracted, and there terminates by a frilled edge, the rest of the interior of the teats and ducts being lined by mucous membrane. But, as the udder in most animals is attached in a pendulous manner to the body, and as the weight of the column of fluid would press with a force which would, in every case, overcome the resistance of the contractions of the extremity, or prove oppressive to the teat, there is in the internal arrangement of the udder a provision made to obviate this difficulty. The various ducts, as they are united, do not become gradually enlarged so as to admit the ready flow of milk in a continual stream to the teat, but are so arranged as to take off, in a great measure, the extreme pressure to which the teat would be otherwise exposed. Each main duct, as it enters into another, has a contraction produced, by which a kind of valvular apparatus is formed in such a manner as to become pouches or sacks, capable of containing the great body of the milk. In consequence of this arrangement, it is necessary that a kind of movement upwards, or lift, should be given to the udder