The names given to the several
cavities are the paunch, the honeycomb bag, the manyplies, and the
reed. How these parts are related to each other, in position and in
shape, must be looked for in the treatises on Anatomy and the
Researches concerning Animals.
Birds also present variations in the part which acts as a
recipient of the food; and the reason for these variations is the same
as in the animals just mentioned. For here again it is because the
mouth fails to perform its office and fails even more completely-for
birds have no teeth at all, nor any instrument whatsoever with which
to comminute or grind down their food-it is, I say, because of this,
that in some of them what is called the crop precedes the stomach
and does the work of the mouth; while in others the oesophagus is
either wide throughout or a part of it bulges just before it enters
the stomach, so as to form a preparatory store-house for the unreduced
food; or the stomach itself has a protuberance in some part, or is
strong and fleshy, so as to be able to store up the food for a
considerable period and to concoct it, in spite of its not having been
ground into a pulp. For nature retrieves the inefficiency of the mouth
by increasing the efficiency and heat of the stomach. Other birds
there are, such, namely, as have long legs and live in marshes, that
have none of these provisions, but merely an elongated oesophagus.
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