The Wichita daily eagle., 1894-01-13
gh duiehta 1ay Eaolc Saturday zo~o. January lso4
LIVING LUNCH BASKETS.
Animals That Garry Their Provisions Will

{. Animals That carry Ine1r PrOvl6lOnE with
Them.
| 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 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 camers back is not a
curvature of the spine. as it may seem,
but mass of fatty material That
hump, in fact, is the camel's lunch
| basket.
When well-fed. healthy camel
starts out on journey across the des-
ert, its water pouch is full, and its
hump is big. When water fails the
camel has only to draw on its reser-
voir, 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 get
ting meal, and very likely the camel
would rather go hungry than do that.
Ia some way the hump is gradually alb
soroed. and for long time after the
camel has been unable to find any
thing to eat, it can get along very com
| fortably on what its hump supplies it
with. By and by, of course, the hump
| is used up, and then the camel will
| starve as quickly as any other animal.
/ A great deal more like genuine
lunch basket is the bag the pelican
carries its foodin. The pelican is about
as ungainly and odd bird as can be
| found and yet is a very interesting
one. 1t has great webbed feet, short
legs, big body, huge wings and an
enormous head.
! It's head is mostly bill, and on the
under part of the bill is a fabby 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 ba that the pelican puts the fish
it catches for its food. When the bag
is full, the pelican rises heavily from
the sea, and with broad sweeps of its
great wings 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 the
wide-open mouth of the hungry bird
Then there are some of the South
American monkeys which have curious
little lunch baskets in their cheeks.
Every body must have seen monkeys
stuffing and stuffing food into their
mouths until their cheeks were bulged
quite out of shape.
1t looks as if the greedy little fellows
were merely cramming their mouths
full. The truth is, many of the
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 little animal called the
pouched rat which has an odder way
than this of carrying its food On each
side of its face is pouch which looks
very much like 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 9TH
er similar animals have still another
way of laying in a supply of food.
They bite off grass and leaves and
swallow them without chewing at all.
The food goes in a special stomach,
there to stay until it is wanted. When
the animal is ready for it, ball of the
food is made up in that first stomach
and sent up in the animals mouth.
That ball is just mouthful, and the
animal can chew it comfortably. After
it is chewed and swallowed it goes into
the proper stomach and is digested.
Eating in that way is called rumina
ting.-John r. Coryell, in Harper's
Young People.