a sort of food prepared of curdled milk purged from the serum or whey, and afterwards dried for use.

Cheese differs in quality according as it is made from new or skimmed milk, from the curd which separates spontaneously upon standing, or that which is more speedily produced by the addition of rennet. Cream also affords a kind of cheese, but quite fat and butteraceous, and which does not keep long. Analyzed chemically, cheese appears to partake much more of an animal nature than butter. It is insoluble in every liquid except spirit of nitre, and caustic alkaline ley. Shaved thin, and properly treated with hot water, it forms a very strong cement if mixed with quicklime. When prepared with hot water, it is recommended in the Swedish Memoirs to be used by anglers as a bait; it may be made into any form, is not softened by the cold water, and the fishes are fond of it.—As a food, physicians condemn the too free use of cheese. When new, it is extremely difficult of digestion: when old, it becomes acid and hot; and, from Dr Percival's experiments, is evidently of a septic nature. It is a common opinion that old cheese digests everything, yet is left undigested itself; but this is without any solid foundation. Cheese made from the milk of sheep digests sooner than that from the milk of cows, but is less nourishing; that from the milk of goats digests sooner than either, but is also the least nourishing. In general, it is a kind of food fit only for the laborious, or those whose organs of digestion are strong.

Every country has places noted for this commodity: thus Cheshire and Gloucester cheese are famous in England; and the Parmesan cheese is in no less repute abroad, especially in France. This sort of cheese is entirely made of fresh cow-milk: but at Rochefort in Languedoc, they make it of ewes milk; and in other places it is usual to add goat or ewes milk in a certain proportion to that of the cow. There is likewise a kind of medicated cheese made by intimately mixing the expressed juice of certain herbs, as sage, baum, mint, &c. with the curd before it is fashioned into a cheese.—The Laplanders make a sort of cheese of the milk of their rein deer; which is not only of great service to them as food, but on many other occasions. It is a very common thing in these climates to have a limb numbed and frozen with the cold: their remedy for this is the heating an iron red hot, and thrusting it through the middle of one of these cheeses; they catch what drops out, and with this anoint the limb, which soon recovers. They are subject also to coughs and diseases of the lungs, and these they cure by the same sort of medicine: they boil a large quantity of the cheese in the froth deer's milk, and drink the decoction in large draughts warm several times a day. They make a less strong decoction of the same kind also, which they use as their common drink, for three or four days together, at several times of the year. For an account of the different processes for making cheese, see CHEESE, AGRICULTURE Index.

CHEESE-Rennet. See GALIUM and RUNNET.

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