Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 11, 2025
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.
The fact that the toes number five is of great importance, because they have clearly been transmitted from the Amphibia to all the higher Vertebrates. Man entirely resembles his amphibian ancestors in this respect, and indeed in the whole structure of the bony skeleton of his five-toed extremities. A careful comparison of the skeleton of the frog with our own is enough to show this.
It does not seem difficult to comprehend, from this point of view, how the feet of a five-toed plantigrade animal may in time have developed into grasping organs, since there would be required only an increased flexibility of the joints, and a wider and fuller movement of the great toes.
Disregarding some problematical five-toed forms like Phenacodus, the first type of undoubted relationship to modern horses is Hyracotherium, a little animal about three feet long that lived during the Eocene period of the Cenozoic epoch.
With the case of the Horses before us, justifying a belief in the production of new animal forms by modification of old ones, I see no escape from the necessity of seeking for these ancestors of the Ungulata beyond the limits of the Tertiary formations. I could as soon admit special creation, at once, as suppose that the Perissodactyles and Artiodactyles had no five-toed ancestors.
And the knowledge we now possess justifies us completely in the anticipation, that when the still lower Eocene deposits, and those which belong to the Cretaceous epoch, have yielded up their remains of ancestral equine animals, we shall find, first, a form with four complete toes and a rudiment of the innermost or first digit in front, with, probably, a rudiment of the fifth digit in the hind foot; while, in still older forms, the series of the digits will be more and more complete, until we come to the five-toed animals, in which, if the doctrine of evolution is well founded, the whole series must have taken its origin.
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 Hyopotamus and Chaeropotamus; but Hyopotamus appears to have had only two toes.
The horse was a horse, from the first five-toed animal in Eocene times, millions of years ago, through all the intermediate forms of four-toed and three-toed, down to the one-toed superb creature of our own day. Amid all the hazards and delays of that vast stretch of time, one may say, the horse-impulse never faltered.
Knowing what this betokened, an elder-sisterly instinct of caution actuated Betty to remind her juniors of an engagement made with Dame Jewel of the upland farm for the exchange of a setting of white duck's eggs for one of five-toed fowls, and to request them to carry the basket.
Man owes his five toes and five fingers to the early amphibians of the sub-carboniferous times. The first tangible evidence of these five toes upon the earth is, to me, very interesting. The earliest record of them that I have heard of is furnished by a slab of shale from Pennsylvania, upon which, while it was yet soft mud, our first five-toed ancestor had left the imprint of his four feet.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking