Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/297

 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 descend- ing aorta and vena cava abdominalis adjacent; they further ex- tend into and seem to lie buried within ample cavities of the ossa ilia. The ureters proceed from the anterior aspects of the kid- neys, 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 faeces, 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 thicker, which, in healthy subjects constitutes the hypostasis or sediment, and subsides when the urine becomes cold ; so is it in birds, but the sedimentary portion is the more abundant, and is distinguished from the liquid by its white or silvery colour ; nor is this sediment met with only in the cloaca, (where it abounds, indeed, and surrounds the faeces,) but in the whole course of the ureters, which are distinguished from the coverings of the kidneys by their white colour. Nor is it only in birds that