The second of Vaucanson’s automata was his celebrated model of a duck, which he himself described in a letter to the Abbé de la Fontaine in 1738. This extraordinary automaton (according to the inventor’s own account of it), exhibited a considerable amount of physiological and anatomical knowledge and the most profound mechanical skill, for in it the operation of eating, drinking, and digestion, were very closely imitated. The duck stretched out its neck to take corn from the hand, it swallowed it and discharged it in a digested condition, the digestion being effected not by trituration, but by dissolution, and (to quote the quaint expressions of the inventor), “The matter digested in the stomach is conducted by pipes (as in an animal by the guts), quite to the anus, where there is a sphincter that lets it out. I don’t pretend,” he says, “to give this as a perfect _digestion_, capable of producing blood and nutritive particles for the support of the animal. I hope nobody will be so unkind as to upbraid me with pretending to any such thing. I only pretend to imitate the mechanism of their action in these things, _i.e._, first, to swallow the corn; secondly, macerate or dissolve it; thirdly, to make it come out sensibly changed from what it was.” But (on the same authority), besides being furnished with a digestive system, the wings were anatomical imitations of nature; not only was every bone imitated, but all the processes and eminences of each bone, and the joints were articulated as in a real animal. After having been wound up, the duck ate and drank, played in the water with his bill, making what is described as a “gugling” sound, rose up on its legs and sat down, flapped its wings, dressed its feathers with its bill, and performed all these different operations without requiring to be touched again. It is important, however, to point out that this digestion story can only be “digested” _cum grano salis_, and this is supplied in the sequel which furnishes the explanation. In the year 1840 the automaton was found hidden away in a garret in Berlin; it was very much out of order, and a mechanician of the name of Georges Tiets undertook to repair it. It was taken to Paris, and in the year 1844 was exhibited in the Place du Palais Royal. In the course of this exhibition one of the wings became deranged, and it was put into the hands of Robert-Houdin for repairs. Robert-Houdin took advantage of this opportunity for examining the so-called digestive system of the automaton, and he thus describes its action: