MAMMALIA—continued.
ORDER 8. Ruminants—continued.
Every created thing has an appointed part to perform; but there are some mysterious parts of which we cannot understand the drift. That of the ruminants, however, is so clearly marked out, that we detect it at a glance.
To qualify myself for supplying your young mind with the food I am going to offer it to-day, I have been obliged, my dear child, to browse in a good many books of which you could have understood but little yourself; and I have been forced to ruminate a long time upon what I have read, and to digest it slowly in my head, which I may say, without vanity, is of larger capacity than yours; no great wonder at my age. Now, if I have succeeded in my undertaking, you will benefit by all the work which has been going on in my mind for the purpose of feeding yours without over-fatigue to it; and I shall almost have the right to say that its nourishment has been derived from me. My lamp could tell you what it has sometimes cost me to supply a single page which might instruct, without repelling you.
Now, this is precisely what the ruminant does. The part he has to perform is to collect in the meadows a sort of food, which would disgust less well-organized stomachs than his own, to work it well up within him, and to give it back in a more palatable and less indigestible form. The little flesh-eaters (carnivora) come afterwards to the feast, and the feast is himself!
The whole history, then, of the ruminant is to be read in his stomach. His real office is to digest, and in fact he devotes the best hours of his days to the perfecting of that beneficent labor, on which the life of so many weak stomachs depends. Have you ever amused yourself by watching a large ox lying down in a meadow? Long after he has finished grazing, his jaw continues to work, turning round and round like the grindstone of a painter when he is rubbing down his colors. Look, and you will see that he will remain there for hours together, motionless and contemplative, absorbed in this incomprehensible mastication, rolling about in his throat from time to time some invisible food. Do not laugh at him, however. As you sec him there he is performing his part in life, he is ruminating.
To ruminate is to chew over again what has been already swallowed; and, however droll this may seem to you, it is the business which all ruminants are born to. You remember the monkey's pouch, which serves him as a larder, whence he takes out his provisions as he wants to eat. The ruminant has an immense pouch of the same kind, into which, while he is grazing, he hastily conveys large masses of half-bitten grass. You probably think he is eating when he has his head down in the grass; but you are mistaken. This is only a preparatory work; he is hastily heaping up in his larder the food he intends to eat by-and-by; only his larder, instead of being, like the monkey's, in his cheeks, where, indeed, there would not have been half room enough for those great bundles he tucks in, is in the middle of his body, close to the extremity of the oesophagus, whose lower wall, being slit at that part, becomes an imperfectly secure tube, ready to burst open under pressure, and allow the food to escape between the edges of the slit; these, otherwise, remaining naturally closed. As soon as the large bundles of grass come to this part, they press against the walls of the tube, which they by this means separate, and fall into the provision-pouch, which bears the name of paunch, or grass-pocket, in fact. As soon as the paunch is well filled, and the animal sure of his dinner, he lies down in some quiet corner, where he proceeds gravely with the important act, which is the real object of his existence. A little below the entrance to the paunch, and communicating both with it and the canal of the oesophagus, is a second receptacle, which old French naturalists, not being much acquainted with Greek, named the cap, on account of its fancied resemblance to the caps worn on the head, and which we call 'king's hood' or 'honey-comb bag.' This second stomach now contracts (at least so it is supposed), and thus retains, as if with a closed fist, a portion of the grass accumulated in the paunch: of this it forms a pellet, which it sends back into the oesophagus, and the oesophagus, by continued contractions from below upwards, returns it to the mouth, where at last the grassy lump is chewed in good earnest, and to some purpose. There is no necessity for hurry; the ruminant has no other business on the face of the earth but this, and thus hour after hour passes away, the food pellets rising one after another to the onslaught of the teeth. Nor do they go back again until they have been reduced by long mastication into an almost liquid paste, which glides through the oesophagus without forcing open the slit, and falls straight into a third pouch, called by old Frenchmen the leaf, on account of certain large folds, some what like the leaves of a book, which line the interior; and known to us as the manyplies. From this stomach, No. 3, this grass-pap passes into a fourth and last bag, which is the real stomach, and where the final work of digestion is accomplished. This fourth pouch also has a pretty little name of the old-fashioned sort, like the three others; it is called the reed or rennet-bag, from the property it possesses, in the calf, of turning milk into curds: and of his four stomachs this is the only one which the ruminant makes use of at first. As long as the young animal is nursed by its mother, the other compartments remain inactive and small in size; they neither grow nor exercise their functions until it begins to eat grass. Indeed, they would probably entirely disappear, if any one would go to the expense of keeping the animal on milk all its life. If it ceased to have anything to ruminate, nature would certainly lose no time in relieving it of its useless workshop of rumination.
As it is right to give every one his due, I will mention that we owe our accurate knowledge of this simple and ingenious mechanism of rumination to the labors of Flourens, a scientific Frenchman, who is still alive, and who has made a great many interesting inquiries into the subject we are now considering, i. e., the life of animals. He is a very clever man into the bargain—so perfect a master of his own language, that the French Academy has felt itself justified in opening its doors to him—an unheard-of honor for a member of the Academy of Sciences. And yet, in spite of all this, I heartily congratulate you that the discovery of the paunch, the cap, the leaf, and the rennet-bag, was not delayed for his arrival. He is just the man who might have been tempted, in his capacity of profound scholar, to have hunted up for them in the Jardin des racines grecques [Footnote: Your brother can tell you about the Jardin des racines grecques. It is a charming little book, of which every generation of collegians has learnt, by heart, the commencement; but I have never known one, even among the most intrepid, who had ever been to the end of it.], four magnificent names, which would only have bewildered you.
Beyond the rennet-bag there is no change of conformation to note, except that the intestinal tube is naturally much longer than ours, on account of the difference of food: as a general rule, it is ten or twelve times the length of the body. The sheep, who is able to pick up a living in the poorest pastures, is indebted for this inestimable power, which makes him the special blessing of dry and barren countries, to a still further peculiarity of organization; with him the intestinal tube is twenty-eight times the length of the body.
We have seen among the Carnivora, whose jaws have so much work to do, that the condyles of the jawbone are sunk deeply into the fossa of the temporal bone. The ruminant, whose peaceful mouth is formed for contending only with grass, is organized quite differently.