The food is digested as in real animals by dissolution and not by trituration; the matter digested in the
stomach is led
off by pipes to the anus, where there is a sphincter allowing it to pass out.
The inventor does not set this up as a perfect digestive system capable of manufacturing blood and nourishing
juices to
support the animal, and it would be unfair to reproach him with this shortcoming. He claims only to imitate
the
mechanics of the digestive process in three things, firstly, the swallowing of the food, secondly the
maceration,
cooking or dissolving of it, and thirdly the action causing it to leave the body in a markedly changed form….
It was necessary to employ different methods to get the artificial duck to take the grain, to transfer it to
the stomach
and here inside a small space to construct a chemical laboratory where the principal part of the food could be
decomposed, and then through a network of tubes to dispose of the food when required from the other extremity.
— Automate, L'Encyclopedie / Dictionnaire des Sciences, 1777;
qtd. in
Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata: A Historical and Technological Study,
tr.
Alec Reid (Editions du Griffon, 1958)
