Still older elephant-like creatures, whose bones we still find in the ground, had front teeth, and very long muzzles, longer even than the sharpest nosed dog, as long, let us say, as the bill of a duck, a snipe, or any long-nosed bird. These, of course, had no trunks, but snouts almost as long, with upper and lower jaw, and lips. Then gradually, generation after generation, these long-snouted creatures lost the front part of their jaws and their front teeth and their under lips. They kept two upper front teeth, which grew very large and became tusks. They kept also their long upper lip, without any bones to hold it in place, so that it hung down and became a trunk.

[The elephant has lost the front of his face except his upper lip.]

So the elephant’s nose isn’t his nose only, but his nose and his upper lip and part of the roof of his mouth. Next time you go to the circus, you watch the elephant when he lifts his trunk so that you can see the under side, and notice the rough cross markings that other beasts have on the roofs of their mouths, and that you yourselves can see in the mirror or feel on the roof of your own mouth with your tongue. Then, when the elephant opens his mouth to take a peanut, see whether his mouth doesn’t look as if his under lip and the whole front of his jaws had been taken off just as I say it has. But the proof of what I say, is there have been found near Cairo, Egypt, the bones of the original elephant who didn’t have a trunk, but did have a very long snout; and of other elephants besides, the great-great-great-grandchildren of these, and the great-great-great-grandfathers of the mammoths and mastodons, who had begun to lose their long muzzles, and to turn their upper lips into trunks.

It’s the same way with any other animal that is different from the rest; his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather many times removed wasn’t nearly so different from other animals as he is. Take for instance, the horse. He is a good deal different from other beasts, with his great size and speed, and his strange single-fingered hand, and his strange single-toed foot, and himself standing up on the nails of his middle fingers and toes.

[Our single-toed horse has been made over from a four-toed one.]

But out in Wyoming and thereabouts they dig out of the ground the bones of old horses that had their middle finger nails and their middle toe nails, which are their hoofs, considerably smaller than our horses have them; while at the same time, the little splint bones, which are the remnants of the fingers and toes next the middle, are much larger than they are now-a-days. Still deeper in the ground, are the bones of still older horses, which had three hoofs on each foot, but the middle one was largest and the two at the side did not touch the ground, just as they don’t in the deer. These horses were only as large as the smallest ponies.

Lower in the ground, still, come the bones of yet older and smaller horses, with three hoofs on each foot, all about the same size; but the hoof has become more like a regular toe with a nail, about like a pig’s, which are about half way between hoofs and toes. Buried even deeper in the earth are the bones of horses no bigger than large dogs, that look like horses, and yet look something like dogs also, and something like sheep; which have four toes on their front feet, that are real toes, only just beginning to turn into hoofs. Last of all, there are the oldest horses of all, no larger than cats, with four toes on their front feet, and the splint bone belonging to the thumb, with claws like a dog’s that are not hoofs at all, horses that had a tail like a dog’s, and looked almost as much like a dog as like a horse, only it had grinding teeth and ate herbs.

So gradually, one little change at a time, this creature that was almost as much dog as horse, lost one toe after another, increased in size, got up on his toes, and became a modern trotter. At the same time, another animal that looked much like one of these little dog-horses, only he was on the whole a little more like a dog, kept on getting more and more dog-like, with smaller claws and sharper teeth and slenderer nose, till he became something that was neither dog nor wolf nor fox, but a general mixture of all three, with some cat and some hyena thrown in.