But that’s the way things are managed—salt blood, and gill slits, tails and gills in the egg and not out, extra lungs for the snakes, and extra eyes for us all, like Little Three Eyes in the story. It’s like the extra legs and tails on the lizard, and the extra heads on the planarian. Nature gets started making things, and doesn’t seem to be able to stop.
XLIX
Horses’ Fingers
The horse does have fingers—as one can easily see by counting up the parts of his legs. Let’s start with the fore-leg, and begin at the top next the body.
The sharp ridge just in front of the place where the saddle goes, between that and the beginning of the mane, is mostly backbone, the same part that we feel under our coat collars at the backs of our necks. The horse’s shoulders, against which the collar rests when he pulls his load, are mostly shoulder-blades, for the chest of all four-footed beasts is narrow, and the shoulder-blades, instead of being on their backs, as ours are, are at their sides. The upper arm, between the shoulder and elbow is short, and is buried in muscle so that one doesn’t notice it. So the first joint that shows, where the fore-leg joins the body, is not the shoulder but the elbow. The upper half of the arm is inside the skin.
The upper half of the horse’s fore-leg, then, is our fore-arm, between elbow and wrist; and sure enough, that bone in the horse is double just as it is in us, and in all animals that can twist their hands round, tho the double bone isn’t the slightest use to the horse. What we call the horse’s knee, then, is his wrist—and again, like our wrists, it has a lot of little bones which make our wrists supple so that we can bend them in all sorts of ways, but which also are no use at all to the horse.
Then there is the horse’s shin—which isn’t shin at all, but the palm-bone of the middle finger, which in us runs from the wrist to the knuckle. The rest of the leg is the middle finger, with the proper three joints, which every finger ought to have, and a gigantic finger nail, which is the hoof. So the horse has a hand, and a very large hand too; only he has lost all his fingers except one, so that he really stands up and runs on the nail of his middle finger. Nevertheless, the horse hasn’t quite lost the rest of his hand; because along the sides of this middle-finger-palm-bone, which we call the shin, lie two other little bones, too small to be any use, which are the palm-bones of the first finger and the third. But once in a long while a colt is born with two little hoofs on these bones, so that it has three fingers instead of one. The rhinoceros, on the other hand, has three fingers, all nearly the same size; while the elephant keeps all five.
Now if you will notice the fore-leg of a cow, you will see that it is just about like that of a horse, till you get down to the wrist. Below that point, the cow, instead of having one palm-bone and one finger, has two. Of course, then, it has two finger nails. The deer has two fingers like the cow, and then two little ones besides, and so does the pig. But the hippopotamus has all four fingers and lacks only the thumb.
All of which, if you keep your eyes open, you can make out for yourselves and more. Only I wish somebody would tell me why all the animals that have horns at the side of their heads—cows and sheep and goats and deer and buffaloes and I don’t know what all—have either two fingers or four; and why the creatures that have one finger, or three fingers, or all five, never have such horns. That is something that nobody has yet been able to find out.
So much then for the horse’s hand—and what a whacking big hand it would be, by the way, if it did have all five fingers instead of only one! Let’s see what we can make out about the horse’s foot.