The Works of William Harvey M.D.: Translated from the Latin with a life of the authorHarvey, William
Science
The Works of William Harvey M.D.: Translated from the Latin with a life of the author
Harvey, William
Blood -- Circulation -- Early works to 1800; Embryology -- Early works to 1800; Physiology -- Early works to 1800
The stomach of birds, then, is situated within the cavity of the
abdomen, below the heart, lungs and liver: the crop, however, is without
the body in some sort, being situated at the lower part of the neck,
over the os jugale or merry-thought. In this bag, as I have said, the
food is only macerated and softened; and several birds regurgitate and
give it to their young, in some measure as quadrupeds feed their progeny
with milk from their breasts; this occurs in the whole family of the
pigeons, and also among rooks. Bees, too, when they have returned to
their hives, disgorge the honey which they have collected from the
flowers and concocted in their stomachs, and store it in their waxen
cells; and so also do hornets and wasps feed their young. The bitch has
likewise been seen to vomit the food which she had eaten some time
before, in a half-digested state, and give it to her whelps: it is not,
therefore, to be greatly wondered at, if we see the poor women, who beg
from door to door, when their milk fails, feeding their infants with
food which they have chewed and reduced to a pulp in their own mouths.
The intestines commence in birds, as has been said, from the upper part
of the stomach, and are folded up and down in the line of the
longitudinal direction of the body, not transversely as in man.
Immediately below the heart, about the waist, and where the diaphragm is
situated in quadrupeds, for birds have no [muscular] diaphragm, we find
the liver, of ample size, divided into two lobes situated one on either
side (for birds have no spleen,) and filling the hypochondria. The
stomach lies below the liver, and downwards from the stomach comes the
mass of intestines, with numerous delicate membranes, full of air,
interposed; the trachea opening in birds, as already stated, by several
gaping orifices into membranous abdominal cells. The kidneys, which are
of large size in birds, are of an oblong shape, look as if they were
made up of fleshy vesicles, without cavities, and lie along the spine on
either side, with the descending aorta and vena cava abdominalis
adjacent; they further extend into and seem to lie buried within ample
cavities of the ossa ilia. The ureters proceed from the anterior aspects
of the kidneys, and run longitudinally towards the cloaca and podex, in
which they terminate, and into which they pour the liquid excretion of
the kidneys. This, however, is not in any great quantity in birds,
because they drink little, and some of them, the eagle for example, not
at all. Nor is the urine discharged separately and by itself, as in
other animals; but, as we have said, it distils from the ureters into
the common cloaca, which is also the recipient of the fæces, and the
discharge of which it facilitates. The urine is also different in birds
from what it is in other animals; for, as the urine in the generality of
animals consists of two portions, one more serous and liquid, another
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