Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 January 1894 — LIVING LUNCH BASKETS. [ARTICLE]

LIVING LUNCH BASKETS.

Of course it is not at all surprising that you should carry your lunch with you when you are going to be away from home all day, but think of an animal doing such a thing! There is the camel, for instance. Everybody knows that it carries its drinking water with it, but it does more; it carries its lunch too. That hump on the camel’s back is not a curvature of the spine, as it may seem, but a mass of fatty material. That hump, in fact, is the camel’s lunch basket. When a well-fed, healthy camel starts out on a journey across the desert, its water pouch is full, and its hump is big. When water fails, the camel has only to draw on its reservoir, and when food is wanting, the hump is called upon. Not that the camel helps itself to bites of its hump. That would be a decidedly uncomfortable way of getting a meal, and very likely the camel would rather go hungry than do that. In some way the hump is gradually absorbed, and for a long time after tne camel has been unable to find anything to eat it can get along very comfortably on what its hump supplies it with. By and by, of course, the hump is used up, and theD the camel will starve as quickly as any other animal. A great deal more like a genuine luneb basket is the bag the pelican carries its food in. The pelican is about as ungainly and odd a bird as can be found, and yet is a very interesting one. It has great webbed feet, short legs, big body, huge wings and an enormous head. Its head is mostly bill, and on the under part of tho bill is a flabby bag made of tough skin. That bag" can stretch and stretch until it can hold an incredible quantity of fish, for it is in that bag that the pelican puts the fish it catches for its food. When tho bag is full, the pelican rises heavily from the sea, aqsl with broad sweeps of its great wiDgs flaps slowly to the shore, where it alights and prepares to enjoy the meal it has earned. One by one the still living fish are tossed into the air and come down head first into thg wide-opened mouth of the hungry bird. Then there are some of x the South American monkeys which have curious little lunch baskets in their cheeks. Everybody must have seen monkeys staffing and stuffing food into their mouths until their cheeks were bulged quite out of shape. It looks as if the greedy littlqf fellows were merely cramming (heir mouths full. The truth is, many of tire monkeys have queer little pockets in their cheeks into which they can stow enough food for a meal. Nor do the full cheeks interfere at all with the chewing of the monkeys any more than if the pockets were outside instead of inside of the mouth. But there is a little animal called the pouched rat which has au odder way than this of carrying its food. On each side of its face is a pouch which looks very much like a kid glove finger drawn in at one end. These pouches stick ‘ straight out from the face and can be made to hold a large supply of food. The cow and deer and sheep and other similar animals have still another way of laying in a supply of food. They bite off grass and leaves and swallow them; without chewing a't alt. The food goes-, into a special stomach, there to stay until it is wanted. When the animal is ready for it, a ball of the food is made, up in that first stomach and sent up in the animal’s mouth That ball is just a mouthful, and the animal can chew it comfortably. After it is chewed and swallowed it goes into the properstomach and is digested. Eating in that way is called ruminating.—[Harper’sYoung People.