QUADRUPEDS THAT CHEW THE CUD.
THIS order of animals is known as the Ruminantia, or the Ruminant Order, because all these animals possess the strange power of ruminating, or of bringing back into their mouth (in order to re-chew it), the food that they have once swallowed.
This power is owing to a complicated structure of their stomach, which is divided into several compartments, and which have been considered, though with some exaggeration, as so many distinct stomachs. The first and largest of these divisions is the paunch, which occupies a large portion of the abdomen. The food is here accumulated after being roughly crushed by the first chewing. After the paunch comes the bonnet or cap stomach. In this cap the food is gradually moulded into small pellets, which ascend again into the mouth, by means of a natural movement, and not a convulsive or irregular one as in other animals; these pellets then undergo a thorough chewing and mixing with the saliva. Such is “chewing the cud.”
When the food, thus transformed into a soft and nearly fluid paste descends again into the stomach, it goes straight into a third intestine and from this it at length passes into the digesting stomach or rennet-bag.
The feet of all these animals terminate in two toes which are joined together in a bone called the shank. Sometimes also there exists at the back of the foot two small spurs or toes. In all these animals except the Camels and Llamas—the hoofs, which entirely cover the last joint of the two toes on each foot, act side by side on a smooth surface, and resemble one single but cloven hoof. Thus the origin of the word cloven-hoofed.
The Ruminants are divided in various ways by different Naturalists. Some are satisfied with the division simply into Horned and Hornless Ruminants. But the best classification is into the two large families of the Camels and Common Ruminants. The Camel family includes the Camels and Dromedaries—the beasts of burden in dessert lands, and the Llama, etc., the beast of burden among the mountains.
The Common Ruminants are divided into three tribes—those with hairy and permanent horns, those with hollow-horns, and those that shed their horns.