Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.15196

    Dissection of a parakeet

    Date
    5 December 1688
    Creator
    Richard Waller (1641 - 1715, British) , Naturalist
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Manuscript page number
    p4
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (page): 202mm
    width (page): 150mm
    Subject
    Biology
       > Zoology
          > Ornithology
    Content object
    nature
       > animal
          > bird
    Description
    Figures of a dissected parakeet and a feather by Richard Waller. The description was read to the Royal Society on 5 December 1688, and printed in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 18, no. 211 (June 1694).
    Object history
    5 December 1688, ‘Mr Wallers description and Anatomy of the Paroquett was read, wherein it was particularly observable, that there are two Crawes before the Gizzard, whereas in most Birds it is single. That the upper beak is moveable and Articulated to the cranium, in which beak there are on the inside severall very small but hard wrinckles or eminences, serving as he conceives for the comminution of the seeds the bird eats, being rubbed against them by the hard and horny end of the tongue. The same gave an accurate description of one of the feathers of that Tayle, whereupon Mr Waller proposes as a very pertinent querie to consider how the severall colours of the same feather, upon the same item can be conceived to become so exactly distinguished at just intervals, in all the features of the tayles, as they are found to be’ (JBC/7/153-54).

    Printed in Richard Waller, ‘Observations in the dissection of a paroquet’, Phil. Trans., vol. 18, no. 211 (June 1694), pp. 153-57 (legend at pp. 156-57).
    Related fellows
    Richard Waller (1660 - 1715, British) , Naturalist
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > United Kingdom
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