To have the stomach of an ostrich has become proverbial, and with good reason; for this bird stands enviably forward in respect to its wonderful powers of digestion, which are scarcely inferior to its voracity. Its natural food consists entirely of vegetable substances, especially grain; and the ostrich is a most destructive enemy to the crops of the African farmers. But its sense of taste is so obtuse, that scraps of leather, old nails, bits of tin, buttons, keys, coins, and pebbles, are devoured with equal relish; in fact, nothing comes amiss. But in this it doubtless follows an instinct, for these hard bodies assist, like the gravel in the crops of our domestic poultry, in grinding down and preparing for digestion its ordinary food. Its fondness for iron was well-known to our forefathers, and we find Shakspeare makes _Jack Cade_ say to _Iden_, in the “Second Part of Henry VI.,” “But I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin.” An earlier writer, John Skelton, who was poet laureate to Henry the Seventh, alludes to an idea then prevalent, that the ostrich swallowed iron for the same purpose that ices are taken in these degenerate days. The lines are taken from his poem “The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe,” “The estryge that wyll eate An horshowe so great In the stede of meate, Such feruent heat His stomake doth freat, He can not well fly Nor synge tunably.” But there was another and far less selfish reason ascribed for the partiality of these birds to iron—a reason so philanthropic, indeed, that it puts mankind to the blush; for there are few, indeed, who would convert their interiors into a marine-store shop for the benefit of their fellow creatures. In a singular book by Thomas Scott, published in 1616, a merchant meets with an ostrich in the desert, in the act of swallowing a heavy meal of iron, and gazing on him with astonishment, inquires, “‘What nourishment can from these mettals grow?’ The ostrich answers: ‘Sir, I do not eate This iron, as you think I do, for meate; I only keep it, lay it up in store, To helpe my needy friends the friendlesse poore, I often meete (as farre and neere I goe) Many a foundred horse that wants a shoe, Serving a master that is monylesse, Such I relieve and helpe in their distresse.’” _Philomythie, etc._