To have the stomach of an ostrich has become proverbial, and with good reason; for this bird stands enviably forward in respect to its wonderful powers of digestion, which are scarcely inferior to its voracity. Its natural food consists entirely of vegetable substances, especially grain; and the ostrich is a most destructive enemy to the crops of the African farmers. But its sense of taste is so obtuse, that scraps of leather, old nails, bits of tin, buttons, keys, coins, and pebbles, are devoured with equal relish; in fact, nothing comes amiss. But in this it doubtless follows an instinct, for these hard bodies assist, like the gravel in the crops of our domestic poultry, in grinding down and preparing for digestion its ordinary food. Its fondness for iron was well-known to our forefathers, and we find Shakspeare makes Jack Cade say to Iden, in the “Second Part of Henry VI.,”
“But I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin.”
An earlier writer, John Skelton, who was poet laureate to Henry the Seventh, alludes to an idea then prevalent, that the ostrich swallowed iron for the same purpose that ices are taken in these degenerate days. The lines are taken from his poem “The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe,”
“The estryge that wyll eate
An horshowe so great
In the stede of meate,
Such feruent heat
His stomake doth freat,
He can not well fly
Nor synge tunably.”