Our Humble Helpers: Familiar Talks on the Domestic Animals

by Jean-Henri Fabre

“The third and last stomach is known as the gizzard. [[19]]It is rounded and is slightly flattened on both sides, like a watch-case, and is composed—especially in birds that live on grain—of a very thick, fleshy wall, lined on the inside with a kind of hard and tenacious leather which protects the organ from attrition. Finally, it is to be noted that at the same time the bird is swallowing grain it takes care also to swallow a little gravel, some very small stones which, away down in the gizzard, will perform the office of teeth.”

“I know what the gizzard is,” volunteered Emile. “When they are cleaning a chicken to cook, they take out of the body something round that they split in two with a knife; then they throw away a thick skin all wrinkled and stuffed with grains of sand, and the rest is put back into the chicken.”

“Yes, that is the gizzard,” said Uncle Paul. “Let us complete these ideas got from cooking. The bird, not having in its beak the molars necessary for grinding, as in a mill, the seeds that are hard to crush, supplies its gizzard with artificial teeth, which are renewed at each repast; that is to say, it swallows little pebbles. The grain, softened in the crop and moistened with the digestive juice during its passage through the succenturiate ventricle, reaches the gizzard mixed with the little stones that are to aid the triturating action. The work then performed is easy to understand. If you pressed in your palm a handful of wheat mixed with gravel, and if your fingers, by continual movement, made the two kinds of particles rub vigorously against each other, is it [[20]]not true that the wheat would soon be reduced to powder? Such is the action of the gizzard. Its strong, fleshy walls contract powerfully and knead their contents of sand and seeds without suffering damage themselves from the friction, because of the tough skin that lines their inside and protects them from the roughness of the gravel. In such a mill the hardest kernels are soon reduced to a sort of soup.

“To make you understand the prodigious power of the gizzard, I cannot do better than relate to you certain experiments performed by a learned Italian, the abbot Spallanzani. A century ago the celebrated abbot, while pursuing his researches on the natural history of animals, caused a number of hens to swallow some little glass balls. ‘These balls,’ he said, ‘were sufficiently tough not to break when thrown forcibly on to the ground. After remaining three hours in the hen’s gizzard they were for the most part reduced to very tiny pieces with nothing sharp about them, all their edges having been blunted as if they had passed through a mill. I noticed also that the longer these little glass balls remained in the stomach, the finer the powder to which they were reduced. After a few hours they were broken into a multitude of vitreous particles no larger than grains of sand.’ ”

“A stomach that can grind glass balls to powder,” commented Jules, “is certainly a first-rate mill.”

“You shall hear something still more remarkable,” returned his uncle. “Wait. ‘As these balls,’ continued the abbot, ‘were polished and smooth, they [[21]]could not create any kind of disturbance in the gizzard.’ So he was curious to see what would happen if sharp and cutting bodies were introduced. ‘We know,’ he says, ‘how easily little pieces of glass, broken up by pounding, tear the flesh. Well, having shattered a pane of glass, I selected some pieces about the size of a pea and wrapped them in a playing card so that they would not lacerate the gullet in their passage. Thus prepared, I made a cock swallow them, well knowing that the covering of card would break on its entrance into the stomach and leave the glass free to act with all its points and sharp edges.’ ”

“With all those little pieces of glass in its stomach,” said Jules, “the bird must surely have died.”

“Not a bit of it. The bird would have come out all right if the experimenter had not sacrificed it to see the result. The cock was killed at the end of twenty hours. ‘All the pieces of glass were in the gizzard,’ the abbot tells us, ‘but all their sharp edges and points had disappeared so completely that, having put these fragments on my palm, I could rub them hard with the other hand without inflicting the slightest wound.

“ ‘The reader,’ he goes on, ‘must be curious to learn the effect produced on the gizzard by these sharp-pointed bodies that rolled around there unceasingly until they lost their keen edges and sharp points. Opening the cock’s gizzard, I examined minutely the inside skin after having well washed and cleaned it. I even separated it from the gizzard, [[22]]which is done without difficulty, and thus it was easy to scrutinize it as closely as I wished. Well, after all my pains I found it perfectly intact, without a tear or cut, without even the slightest scratch. The skin appeared to me absolutely the same as that of the cocks that had not swallowed glass.’ ”

“So the bird that is made to swallow pieces of broken glass,” said Jules, “grinds them up without injury and without even a scratch, while we could not so much as handle this dangerous stuff with the tips of our fingers without wounding ourselves. This power of the gizzard is really inconceivable.”