PINE llULLFINCir. 703 



TYRRHULA ENUCLEATOR. PINE BULLFINCH. 



Yol.I, p. 411. 



Through the kindness of Mr Audubon, who presented me 

 with several specimens of this bird, I am enabled to add an 

 account of its digestive organs. But as my description of them 

 in the fourth volume of his Ornithological Biography is as per- 

 fect as I could make it, I here take the liberty of transcribing 

 it. In an adult male, the roof of the mouth is moderately con- 

 cave, its anterior part with five prominent ridges ; the lower 

 mandible deeply concave. Tongue 4| twelfths long, firm, de- 

 flected at the middle, deeper than broad, papillate at the base, 

 with a median groove ; for the distal half of its length, it is 

 cased with a firm horny substance, and is there of an oblong 

 shape when viewed from above, deeply concave, with two flat- 

 tened prominences at the base, the point rounded and thin, the 

 back or lower surface convex. This remarkable structure of 

 the tongue appears to be intended for the purpose of enabling 

 the bird, when it has insinuated its bill between the scales of a 

 strobilus, to lay hold of the seed by pressing it against the 

 roof of the mandible. In the Crossbills, the tongue is nearly 

 of the same form, but more slender, and these birds feed in 

 the same manner, in so far as regards the prehension of the 

 food. In the present species, the tongue is much strengthened 

 by the peculiar form of the basi-hyoid bone, to which there is 

 appended as it were above a thin longitudinal crest, giving it 

 great firmness in the perpendicular movements of the organ. 

 The oesophagus is two inches and eleven twelfths long, dilated 

 on the middle of the neck so as to form a kind of elongated di- 

 midiate crop, four twelfths of an inch in diameter, projecting 

 to the right side, and with the trachea passing along that side 

 of the vertebrae. The proventriculus is eight twelfths long, 

 somewhat bulbiform, with numerous oblong glandules, its great- 

 est diameter 4g twelfths. A very curious peculiarity of the 

 stomach is that in place of having its axis continuous with that 

 of the oesophagus or proventriculus, it bends to the right nearly 

 at a right angle. It is a very powerful gizzard, eight and a 



