We show that the magnetic moments of the octet baryons can be fitted to an accuracy of 1.5% by a phenomenological Lagrangian in which SU(3) breaking corrections appear only linearly. This is in contrast to conventional chiral perturbation theory in which corrections non-analytic in SU(3) breaking dominate and tend to spoil the agreement with the data. Motivated by this observation, we propose a modified scheme for chiral perturbation theory that gives rise to a similar linear breaking of SU(3) symmetry.
