The bronchia or ends of the trachea in birds, moreover, are perforate, and open into the abdomen (and this is an observation which I do not remember to have met with elsewhere), so that the air inspired is received into and stored up within the cells or cavities formed by the membranes mentioned above. In the same manner as fishes and serpents draw air into ample bladders situated in the abdomen, and there store it up, by which they are thought to swim more lightly; and as frogs and toads, when in the height of summer they respire more vigorously assume more than the usual quantity of air into their vesicular lungs, (whence they acquire so large a size,) which they afterwards freely expire, croaking all the while; so in the feathered tribes are the lungs rather the route and passage for respiration than its adequate instrument. Now, had Fabricius seen this, he would never have denied that these membranes (with the assistance of the abdominal muscles at all events,) could subserve respiration and perform the office of the diaphragm, which, indeed, of itself, and without the assistance of the abdominal muscles, were incompetent to act as an instrument of respiration. And, then, the diaphragm has another duty to perform in those creatures in whom it is muscular or fleshy, viz., to depress the stomach filled with food, and the intestines distended with flatus, so that the heart and lungs shall not be invaded, and life itself oppressed in its citadel. But as there was no danger of anything of this kind in birds, they have a membranous septum, perfectly well adapted to the purposes of respiration, so that they have very properly been said to have a diaphragm. And were birds even entirely without anything in the shape of a diaphragm, still would Aristotle not be liable to criticism for speaking of the ova commencing at the septum transversum, because by this title he merely indicates the place where the diaphragm is usually met with in other animals. In the same way we ourselves say that the ovary is situated at the origin of the spermatic vasa præparantia, although the hen has, in fact, no such vessels. The perforations of the lungs discovered by me (and to which I merely direct attention in this place,) are neither obscure nor doubtful, but, in birds especially, sufficiently conspicuous, so that in the ostrich I found many conduits which readily admitted the points of my fingers. In the turkey, fowl, and, indeed, almost all birds, you will find that a probe passed downwards by the trachea makes its way out of the lungs, and is discovered lying naked and exposed in one or another of the abdominal cells. Air blown into the lungs of these creatures with a pair of bellows passes on with a certain force even into the most inferior of these cells.