On the presence or absence of air in the bones of birds / by Edwards Crisp.

  • Crisp, Edwards, 1806-1882.
Date:
[1857]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the presence or absence of air in the bones of birds / by Edwards Crisp. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    maccaw, turkey, black-cock, and common fowl. The humeri and femora were perforated, and the air-sacs and lungs inflated through the apertures. He came to the conclusion (verified by finding that the thigh- and wing-bones of a sparrow contained marrow) that all high-flying birds had the bones of the extremities filled with air; and he thought it probable that the wing-bones only of the swans, geese and ducks would be found to be hollow. After John Hunter's paper in the sixty-fourth volume of the London Philosophical Transactions, 1774, being An Account of certain receptacles of air in birds, which communicate with the lungs and are lodged among the fleshy parts and in the hollow bones of these animals, Camper published a letter (vol. hi. p. 474) claiming the discovery three years before Hunter had spoken of it. Hunter, in the paper above mentioned, appears to have confined his observations to a few birds, and his three quoted experiments for the purpose of showing that a bird may breathe through apertures made in the humerus or air-sacs, are very inconclusive. The birds he speaks of are the ostrich, the common fowl, the woodcock, peli- can and canary. The chief object of the paper was to show that the air-sacs and bones are appendages to the lungs. The essays of these great anatomists, of which I have given a brief outline, will well repay perusal; and if many subsequent writers upon the subject had depended upon their own observations, the prevailing error that the bones of a bird are filled with air, would not have occurred. In Cuvier's Animal Kingdom' is the following:—The air-cavities which occupy the interior of their body, and even (usually) super- sede the marrow in their bones, increase their specific lightness. Milne-Edwards, in his ' Elemens de Zoologie,' p. 504, says, In general, air is found in great abundance in the bones of the members most employed in locomotion. In the ostrich, for example, the air- cells in the femur have a remarkable development. The late Mr. Yarrell, whose recent death we all so much deplore, does not in his work on British Birds speak of the bones ; but in his 'British Fishes' (Introduction, p. 21), he says, in alluding to the air-bladder, The analogy to the air-cells in birds, and the pas- sage of air from thence into the bones of the limbs, is too obvious to be unobserved, and will give interest to further investigation. So that Mr. Yarrell's impression evidently was, that the limb-bones of birds were supplied with air. Mr. Rymer Jones, in his ' Organization of the Animal Kingdom,' 1855, p. 75, says, Birds, in fact, breathe not only with their lungs, but the vital element penetrates almost every part of the interior of their bodies, bathing the surfaces of their viscera, and entering the very cavities of their bones; so that the blood is most extensively subjected to its influence. In Carpenter's 'Comparative Physiology,' 1854, it is said, that Even the bones are made subservient to this function (respiration); for though at an early period they possess a spongy structure, like those of reptiles, and are filled with thin marrow, they subsequently become hollow, and their cavities communicate with the lungs. In the aquatic species, however, the original condition is retained through life. And in his ' Manual for the Use of Students,' p. 386, it is stated, that in most birds the bones are hollow.