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A roar of astonishment followed when they beheld my blue sock, as they generally surmised that my feet were blue and toeless. Greater astonishment still followed the withdrawal of the sock, and the revelation of a white five-toed foot. I frequently found that they considered that only the visible parts of me were white, namely, my face and hands, and that the rest of me was as black as they were.
We may conclude from this that the stem-forms of the Primates, which we must regard as the earliest Lemurs, were evolved directly from the opossum. We must not forget, however, that the conversion of the five-toed foot into a prehensile hand is polyphyletic.
Yet who can doubt that, whenever a sufficiently extensive series of lacustrine and fluviatile beds of that age becomes known, the lineage which has been traced thus far will be continued by equine quadrupeds with an increasing number of digits, until the horse type merges in the five-toed form towards which these gradations point?
Vogelstein also laughed, shaking volcanically within, whenever the Coronal, the genuineness of which he still maintained, was mentioned. And he always treated Brush with a curious and almost tender condescension, much in fact as the mastodon might have regarded that fragile ancestor of the horse, the five-toed protohippos.
The pulsator, with pointed toe and gently turned calf, would make a progress in a direct line, but as the sole touched the ground, the heel would slightly rise and then fall, and whilst you were admiring the undulating grace of the pulsator, unobserved and silently you would find the gyrator had stolen a march upon you, and actually taken the pas of its five-toed brother.
Where, then, must we look for its five-toed ancestor? If we follow down other lines of recent and tertiary Ungulata, the same question presents itself. The Pigs are traceable back through the Miocene epoch to the Upper Eocene, where they appear in the two well-marked forms of Hyopopotamus and Choeropotamus; but Hyopotamus appears to have had only two toes.
As yet even the two general types of herbivore and carnivore are so imperfectly separated that it is not always possible to distinguish between them. Nearly all of them have the five-toed foot of the reptile ancestor; and the flat nails on their toes are the common material out of which the hoof of the ungulate and the claw of the carnivore will be presently fashioned.
It will be enough for us merely to establish the fact that the one-toed horse is an evolved descendant of a primitive five-toed mammal, through the adaptation of its foot to running on firm ground, its teeth and neck to feeding on grasses, and so on. On the other hand, the facts we have already seen seem to justify the attitude of compromise I adopted in regard to the Mutationist theory.
These children grew up, and when they came to adult years, they all married, and of course it happened that they all married five-fingered and five-toed persons. Now let us see what were the results.
This reduction of the number of the toes to six, and then to five, probably took place in the second half of the Devonian period at the latest, in the subsequent Carboniferous period in those Dipneusta which we regard as the ancestors of the Amphibia. We have several fossil remains of five-toed Amphibia from this period. B larva, restored, with gills.
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