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In their evolution, digit number one was first dropped, and the middle pair became larger and more massive, while the side digits, numbers two and five, became shorter, weaker, and less serviceable. The FOUR-TOED ARTIODACTYLS culminated in the Tertiary; at present they are represented only by the hippopotamus and the hog.
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.
They were wiser also in many ways, for they had found out many things for themselves which is the very best sort of wisdom. Now even Dodo could tell by the footprints on the sand whether a three-toed Plover or a four-toed Sandpiper had been pattering there.
Here is still another conundrum for the bird student: Why do the four-toed woodpeckers have two hind digits, despite the fact that they always clamber upward when they take their promenades on the boles and branches of the trees, whereas the agile little nuthatch, which glides upward or downward, as the impulse moves him, has only one rear toe and three in front, like the true perchers?
Probably many more species of animals have become extinct than have survived, but none of these could have been in the line of man's descent, else the human race would not have been here. If the Eocene progenitor of the horse, the little four-toed eohippus, had been cut off, would not the world have been horseless to-day?
We descended the steep sandy bank in a spot that the Arabs had broken down to reach the water, and after trudging across about 400 yards of deep sand, we reached the extreme and narrowest end of the pool; here for the first time I saw the peculiar four-toed print of the hippopotamus's foot.
Woodward, "a typical bird's 'merrythought' between the wings, and the hind leg is exactly that of a perching bird." In other words, it has the shoulder-girdle and four-toed foot, as well as the feathers, of a bird. As in the living Peripatus, therefore, we have here a very valuable connecting link between two very different types of organisms.
Contrasted with these, Artiodactyla have always an even number of functional digits, the third and fourth reaching the ground symmetrically, bearing the weight and forming the "split hoof;" the second and fifth remain, in most cases, as mere vestiges, showing externally as the accessory hoofs or dewclaws; in the hippopotamus alone they are fully developed and the animal has a four-toed foot.
But there are no transitional forms showing alleged changes in the development of the horse from the four-toed creature of squirrel like size. Many varieties and individuals under the skill of man have been developed and improved, but not a single new species in historic time. There are 5,000 varieties of apples but no new species.
"We know, for example, that there has existed a more or less complete chain of beings from monad to man, that the one-toed horse had a four-toed ancestor, that man has descended from an unknown ape-like form somewhere in the Tertiary." "We know" that is exactly the opposite of the truth.
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