GREEN-FOOTED WATER-HEN. 549 



half an inch. The proventricular glands are oblong, compa- 

 ratively few, as in a gallinaceous bird, and forming a belt an 

 inch in breadth. The stomach is a powerful gizzard, obliquely 

 situated, an inch and ten and a half twelfths broad, an inch and 

 a half long, the right lateral muscle ten twelfths and a half, 

 the left nine twelfths thick ; the cuticular lining thick, with 

 longitudinal rugae. The intestine is thirty-one inches long, 

 varying in diameter from three-twelfths to a twelfth and a half. 

 The rectum is two inches and three quarters long; and the cceca 

 are four inches and a half in length, their greatest diameter 

 four and a half twelfths, half an inch of their extremity in- 

 curved. There is considerable analogy in the digestive organs 

 to those of the Rasores. The stomach is precisely similar, 

 the rectum is of the same form, the cceca approximate ; but 

 there is no crop, and the intestine is more slender. In an 

 individual killed at Duddingston Loch, in April 1835, the 

 dimensions of the digestive organs were somewhat different. 

 (Esophagus six and a half inches long; stomach an inch and 

 three quarters in diameter ; intestine forty-one inches long ; 

 the cceca six inches in length, and coming off at the distance 

 of four inches from the extremity. 



The flesh is white in autumn and the beginning of winter, 

 when there is a layer of fat under the skin. It affords good 

 eating, not much inferior to that of the partridge. 



The frontal plate is of a brighter red than the bill, yellow- 

 ish at its upper margin. It is larger in the male than in the 

 female. Its surface is smooth and glossy, being formed of 

 cuticle continuous with that of the bill. The external 

 pellicle is colourless, the inner layers tinged with red ; but 

 the principal seat of the colour, both of this plate and of the 

 bill, is the rete mucosum, which is of dense texture. Beneath 

 it is a pad of dense cellular tissue, of which the minute in- 

 terstices are filled with adipose matter. This part has the 

 appearance of being glandular, and resembles the substance of 

 the uropygial gland, but has no duct, and is certainly con- 

 densed adipose tissue, the oil obtained from it being very 

 pure. The colour of the frontal plate is not, then, as some 

 assert, caused by its vascular texture, although it becomes 

 brighter in spring than at any other season. 



