in rural affairs, a place appropriated for the management of milk, and the making of butter, cheese, &c. See Butter, Cheese, &c.

The dairy-house should always be kept in the neatest order, and so situated as that the windows or lattices never face the south, south-east, or south-west. Lattices are also to be preferred to windows, as they admit a more free circulation of the air than glazed lights possibly can do. It has been objected, that they admit cold air in winter and the sun in summer; but the remedy is easily obtained, by making a frame the size of or somewhat larger than the lattice, and constructing it so as to slide backward and forward at pleasure. Packthread strained across this frame, and oiled cap paper pasted thereon, will admit the light, and keep out the sun and wind.

It is hardly possible in the summer to keep a dairy-house too cool; on which account none should be situated far from a good spring or current of water. They should be neatly paved either with red brick or smooth hard stone; and laid with a proper descent, so that no water may lodge. This pavement should be well washed in the summer every day, and all the utensils belonging to the dairy should be kept perfectly clean. Nor should we ever suffer the churns to be scalded in the dairy, as the steam that arises from hot water will injure the milk. Nor should cheese be kept therein, nor rennet for making cheese, nor a cheese-press be fixed in a dairy, as the whey and curd will diffuse their acidity throughout the room.

The proper receptacles for milk are earthen pans, or wooden vats or trundles; but none of these should be lined with lead, as that mineral certainly contains a poisonous quality, and may in some degree affect the milk: but if people are so obtinate as to persist in using them, they should never forget to scald them, scrub them well with salt and water, and to dry them thoroughly, before they deposit the milk therein. Indeed all the utensils should be cleaned in like manner before they are used; and if after this they in the least degree smell sour, they must undergo a second scrubbing before they are fit for use.

DAKIR, in our statutes, is used for the twentieth part of a last of hides. According to the statute of DAL

51 Hen. III. De compositione ponderum & mensurarum, a last of hides consists of twenty dakirs, and every dakir of ten hides. But by 1 Jac. cap. 33, one last of hides or skins is twelve dozen. See DICKER.