The History of a Mouthful of Bread by Jean Macé (great novels to read txt) 📕

of the blood: but, in dealing with them, one must also make allowances, as they say, for the fire within, and know how to open the cage now and then. It is not for you, however, that I say this, young lady: you are no longer a little child; but it may happen that you may have some to take care of some day. Believe me, then, you must not expect too much wisdom from them, and you must allow them to change their perch every now and then. It is a law of our Almighty Father that little children, and little birds, should not stay too long in one place.

The mechanism of the circulation is here the same as with us, and does not offer any important peculiarity. Only the left ventricle of the heart has walls of extreme thickness, which enable it to launch the blood into the members with greater vigor and rapidity; and the blood itself, although it is composed of precisely the same materials as that of the mammals, differs from it nevertheless as regards the globules. In the first place, they are more numerous; secondly, they are larger; and finally, instead of being round like a plate, they are drawn out ovally, and are almost shaped like those long dishes on which fish is usually served. I shall not attempt to give you the reason of their size and form. This is hidden from us in the same mystery which envelopes all the microscopic population of the blood; but is it not a curious thing, this strange persistency of form in the globules ofall animals of one class? In all birds they are oval; in all mammals they are round. In all? Nay, I am wrong. As if the better to hide from us the key to this riddle, nature has amused herself by making an exception. Camels and llamas, I forgot to tell you, have also globules in the form of long dishes, like the hen and the chaffinch. Find out why, if you can. As to the reason of the number, it is a very simple one. Since the energy of the blood resides in the globules, it follows that the most energetic blood will contain the largest amount of globules. Looking at you, for instance, little monkey, running and jumping about the garden, I would lay a wager, without counting first, that there are, in one drop of your blood, some millions more globules than in one of mine.

Let us now go on to the digestion, with which, properly, we ought to have begun; but I preferred pointing out to you, first, the particular character which is the chief mark of distinction in the organization of the bird.

'When hens grow teeth,' says a shrewd proverb, meaning of course,
never . Birds have no teeth, and in this respect there is no variety among them. All, from the first to the last, have uniformly the same tool to eat with-the bill, that is-which is, in all cases, composed of the same elements, two jawbones elongated to a point, and clothed in a horny armour, which makes their edges sharp and cutting. At the same time were we to review the birds in detail, as we have done the mammals, you would see that there are almost more modifications to be observed in this one single instrument than in our thirty-two teeth. All birds have a beak, but each has his own, organized expressly with reference to the kind of food needed by its owner. The eagle's beak, which mangles living prey, is pointed, bent, and hard as steel; the bill of the duck, which laps up water from ponds and puddles, in order to get worms and half-decomposed refuse out of it, is soft, and flattened like a shovel. The woodpecker's, which has to pierce the trunks of trees, is like a pickaxe; that of the humming-bird, which has to suck up the juice of flowers from the bottom of their corollas, is slender as a needle. The swallow feeds on flies, which it snaps up on the wing, and has a soft bill, which opens like a little oven. The stork picks up reptiles in the mud of the marshes; its beak is straight-pointed, cutting as a knife, and resembles a long pair of pincers. The sparrow feeds especially on hard grains, difficult to break; accordingly its beak is stumpy, short, and thick, and is arched on the upper side for still further solidity. But I should never end if I began to enumerate all the thousand varieties in the bills of birds. Each variety, too, corresponds with some peculiar sort of life, and consequently with a general conformation (easily ascertained) of the animal in which it appears. Give a naturalist the bill of a bird -only its bill remember-and he will tell you half its history without fear of being mistaken.

On the other hand, we must not deceive ourselves as to the real value of this complaisant bill. Let it transform itself as it pleases into all manner of forms for the better fulfilment of its task, it makes, at the best, but a very poor instrument for mastication; nay, to say the truth, it breaks, cuts, and tears, but it never masticates at all. Thus the bird's mouthful is far from undergoing as perfect a preparation as ours does. It is no sooner taken in than it is swallowed, and the salivary glands, which are still to be found under the tongue, seem only to be there as a matter of form; what little saliva they produce is thick and sticky, and has none of the qualities necessary for making that liquid paste which our tongue sweeps up from every corner of the mouth. Besides, it must be owned that a bird's tongue would be a very awkward implement in such a task. Open a hen's bill and you will see therein a very inferior sort of porter. It is merely a dry hard lance, as it were, armed with prickles at the point, as ill-qualified for tasting as for sweeping. So the hen does not waste her time in finding out the flavor of what is thrown to her. She picks up and swallows over and over again, without appearing to experience any other pleasure than that of satisfying her appetite. Birds of prey, it is true, have rather more convenient tongues, capable, moreover, of tasting up to a certain point; and the parrot, who is a complete epicure, and chews his food philosophically, has a charming-little black one, thick, fleshy, and susceptible-a true porter, in fact-who enables Polly thoroughly to enjoy her breakfast. But certain birds who live on insects surpass even the hen in the dryness and hardness of their tongues. That of the woodpecker, especially, is a model of the kind, and deserves a few words more than the others. Picture to yourselves a long pin, terminated by an iron point with barbs like those of fish-hooks. An ingenious mechanism enables the bird to dart it out with the rapidity of lightning, far beyond his bill, upon the insects to which he gives chase. The point pierces them, and the hooks retain them, without any need of assistance from the bill. I have just told you that this bill pierces the bark of trees; but it only plays the part of gamekeepers on grand sporting occasions, who beat the bushes to make the game rise. The woodpecker's bill routs up the insects by destroying their shelter; but the real sportsman is the tongue. Good-bye to any notion of a cosy little chat in such a porter's lodge as that! What could a harpoon have to say for itself?

Do not, however, let this miserable entrance-hall alarm you, at the same time, for the fate of the mouthful thus presented half-dressed to the œsophagus. You will find it only so much the better treated within. In the first place, the œsophagus, when half-way down to the stomach, swells out suddenly and forms a pocket, which is generally particularly well developed in birds who feed on grain; this is called the crop in English, in French jabot ; whence comes the application of that word to those full shirt-frills which have sometimes been the fashion. It is the pigeon's crop that gives him the rounded chest over which he bridles so prettily. The crop is a receptacle where the food makes a halt: it is something between the pouch of the monkey and the paunch of the ox; a preparatory stomach, which does not, it is true, send back the grain to the bill, for the bill could do it no good, but in which that grain lies until there is room for it further on.

Prom thence it resumes its journey; but, before reaching the true stomach, it passes through a second enlargement of the oesophagus, whose walls are pitted with numberless little cavities, from which pour over it the juices destined to supply the place of the saliva that was wanting above.

It reaches its destination at last, but still hard, and generally whole. No matter, however. The stomach which receives it, and which is called the gizzard, is quite a different sort of thing from a useless membrane, thin and delicate like ours. It is a thick muscle of enormous power, lined inside with a kind of horny skin, so tough that nothing can break through it. You may form some idea of the prodigious strength of this organ, when I tell you that turkey-fowls have been made to swallow hollow balls of glass, so thick as not to break when dropped to the ground, and that at the end of a few days they have been found reduced almost to powder in the uninjured stomach. No fear of indigestion with such an apparatus as that. Though the grain may not have been masticated in the bill, what does it signify? There is a power here, as you see, quite equal to carrying the whole work through. Thanks, indeed, to the invaluable horn which lines it, fowls which have no teeth of their own can safely present themselves with as many and as hard ones as they please. They swallow small pebbles, which rub against the grain, during the contractions of the gizzard, and act just as effectually as if they were fixed in the jawbone. Well, this terrible gizzard performs its crushing work with such energy, that not only the grain but the pebbles themselves are ground down there, and end by being pounded into fine sand. When you rear fowls, do not forget, if you keep them shut up, to put within their reach a store of small pebbles, so that they may have teeth to run to in time of need.

You remember the pylorus -the porter down below, who keeps the door of egress from our stomach? He is as badly provided for here as his fellow-workmen up above; worse in fact. It is a gaping hole, and we cannot expect a very strict supervision from it. Birds who feed on fruits profit by this fact to carry vegetables from one country to another. With such an easy opening, seeds have a good many chances of passing from the stomach unaltered; and then they drop from the clouds, as is supposed, hap-hazard, and germinate afterwards, when circumstances prove favorable, to grow up before the astonished eyes of the natives into plants of which they have never even heard. The French Acclimatization Society, which I spoke of lately, and which, though so modern, has correspondents all over the globe, is at this moment laboring to effect an exchange between all countries of the natural productions of their soil. But here you see that nature had thought of this before, and established her