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"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.
To produce modern horses and zebras from these nearer ancestors, few additional changes in the structure of the feet are necessary, for the lateral toes need only to become a little more reduced and the middle one to enlarge slightly to give the one-toed limb of modern types, with its splint-like vestiges still in evidence to show that the ancestor's foot comprised more of these terminal elements.
After a long silence I picked up his book again and pointed at the picture of the mammoth. "What color is it?" I asked. "Kinder red an' brown," he answered, promptly. "It's woolly, too." Astounded, I pointed to the dingue. "One-toed," he said, quickly; "makes a noise like a bell when scutterin' about." Intensely excited, I laid my hand on his arm.
And, most important of all, Professor Marsh has discovered a series of mammalian remains, occurring in successive geological epochs, which are held to represent beyond cavil the actual line of descent of the modern horse; tracing the lineage of our one-toed species back through two and three toed forms, to an ancestor in the eocene or early tertiary that had four functional toes and the rudiment of a fifth.
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.
Since the doctrine of evolution and its evidences began to occupy the thoughts of the intellectual world at large, no fossil forms have received more attention than the ancient members of the horse tribe. As we have learned, a modern horse is described by comparative anatomy as a one-toed descendant of remote five-toed ancestors.
No wonder that the diseased, the deformed, the blind, the one-toed, the twelve-toed, and monstrous parts and organs are the rule rather than the exception. These things are true of nine-tenths of this people. ILOILO 25th. Reuter's Telegrams. LONDON 25th. Novr. The British losses at Belmont are stated at 48 killed, 146 wounded, and 21 missing.
From some such ancestral type the highly specialized one-toed modern horse has evolved, while during the uncounted ages that saw the horse thus develop the tapir has continued substantially unchanged.
But whereas all the individual titanotheres finally died out, leaving no descendants, a number of the three-toed horses did leave descendants, and these descendants, constantly changing as the ages went by, finally developed into the highly specialized one-toed horses, asses, and zebras of to-day.
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.
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