The thigh, as you can easily make out when the horse moves, starts close up to the tail, and like the upper arm, is almost wholly inside the skin. So the first joint that shows is the knee, and the great muscles which, as you sit behind to drive, you see pulling you along so strongly, are those of the calf of the leg. The joint that comes nearest the driver’s feet, which we call the gambrel, is then the heel. It certainly does look like a heel; and the rest of the leg is the middle one of the five long bones of the foot, with the middle toe on the end of it. So the horse stands on the end of his middle toe, and his hind hoof is his middle toenail.

The cow, of course, keeps two toes with their foot-bones. The dog has four. I don’t think a dog ever puts his heel down so as to stand on the whole flat of his foot, except sometimes when he stands up to beg. But cats and rabbits often do, when they want to stand up on their hind legs to see as far as possible. Still they don’t do it enough to have soles to their feet all the way back to the heel. But the bears and the monkeys and a lot of other animals that can’t run very fast, do put the whole foot down on the ground, and do have a sole all the way back to the heel. In general, the faster an animal can run, the more it stands up on its fingers and toes, the longer its feet and hands are, the shorter its thighs and upper arms, and the fewer fingers and toes it has. That’s why the horse, which I suppose is about the fastest animal there is, has his fore-leg at least half hand, and his hind leg mostly foot.

Some learned men devote their entire lives to making out just this sort of correspondence between the various bones and muscles and other parts of one animal, and those of others and of man. A most fascinating game it is, too; and a game that everyone can play a little, and keep on playing as long as he lives and keeps learning more and more about animals.

L
How The Elephant Got His Trunk

According to the Just So Stories, in the high and far off times, before any elephant ever had any trunk, there was a certain Elephant’s Child who was afflicted with an insatiable curiosity. And after this Elephant’s Child had been spanked for this same insatiable curiosity by his tall aunt, the Ostrich, and by his tall uncle, the Giraffe, and by his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, and by his hairy uncle, the Baboon, grievously and frequently, without stopping, for a long time, he started out for the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, to see what the Crocodile has for dinner And the Crocodile caught the Elephant’s Child by the nose, which was just a common nose and not a trunk at all, and pulled and pulled and pulled, being minded to have Elephant’s Child for the beginning of his dinner. And the Elephant’s Child spread out his little four legs, and he pulled and pulled and pulled, until between them, they stretched out the Elephant’s Child’s nose into the first elephant’s trunk that ever was. So all other elephants have had such trunks ever since.

This is Mr. Kipling’s story of how the elephant got his trunk. This and several more like it of the Just So Stories, you must all read for yourselves, for altogether they are about as good stories as have been written by anybody this long time. Besides, something not so very different from this adventure of the Elephant’s Child did really happen. Only it didn’t happen in quite the same way; and instead of there being one Elephant’s Child, there were many, many, many, one after another for hundreds of years, each with a nose a little more stretched out and a little more trunk-like than those which came before it.

So what really happened is something like this: The elephant that you feed peanuts to at the circus, now-a-days, is a strange sort of beast, with his long trunk, his hairless body, his tall legs like the stems of trees, and no front part to his jaws, so that he has only his back teeth. The parents of the elephants that you see were elephants like himself. So were his grand-parents; and their grand-parents in their turn. But if you could go back a very long time, back to the days when the first men appeared in Europe, you would find that the elephants of those days were somewhat more like other four-footed animals. For one thing, they had fur like other animals, while instead of having only four grinding teeth in use at once, they had nearly a full set as most other beasts have. These are the great mastodons and mammoths, whose bones are still dug out of the soil in the United States, in Europe, and in various other parts of the world, and whose bodies have been found frozen in the ice in Siberia, so well preserved that the dogs ate the flesh after they were dug out. There are none of these left alive now, but we still have the pictures of them which men long ago scratched on pieces of bone or sketched on the walls of the caves in which they lived before they knew enough to build houses.

[Early man scratched pictures of the mammoth on pieces of its own bones.]