HIPPARION HORSE
Fig. 10.—To the left, the fore-foot of the horse-ancestor, Hipparion, showing three toes: to the right, the back view of a long bone of a modern horse’s foot, with rudiments of outer toes, called splint-bones.
In the upper Tertiary we find the remains of a kind of horse (the Hipparion), with well-developed “petti-toes” (like those of a pig) on each side of the big central toe ([Fig. 10]). In the middle Tertiary we find smaller ancestral horses, with three toes of nearly equal size, and in the lower Tertiary a horse-ancestor as small as a fox-hound (the Hyracotherium), with four toes on its front foot and three on its hind foot. Coming very close to this in general character is another small extinct animal of the same age, with five toes on each foot. As the toes have dwindled in number and size, leaving at last only the big central toe (as we pass upward from the small ancestors to the big modern horse), so the cheek-teeth, too, have changed. At first they had shallow crowns and divided fangs, and showed four prominences on the crown which were little, if at all, worn down during life. But as the horse became a bigger animal and took to eating coarse tooth-wearing grass, his teeth became deeper, and continued to grow for a long time, whilst the crown was rubbed down by the hard food, and a curiously complex pattern was brought into view by the exposure of the irregular bosses of the crown in cross section. And, meanwhile, the size and proportions of the horse-ancestors changed until, after being pig-like, then tapir-like, they acquired the perfect form and size for fleet and prolonged movement over firm, grass-grown plains. Horses and other large animals have to run, not only to escape pursuit by carnivorous enemies, but in order to travel, before they die from thirst, from a region suddenly dried up by drought to a region where water can be had. Many thousands of wild animals perish every year from local droughts in Africa. No small animals can exist in regions liable to be affected by sudden drought.
Three-toed horses, like the upper Tertiary Hipparion, are occasionally born as “monstrosities” from ordinary horses at the present day. All horses have the remnant of a toe on each side of the big central toe—in the form of splint-bones—concealed beneath the skin. In some breeds, for instance, in the “Shire” horses, which have enormous hairy feet in proportion to their huge strength and weight, these splint-bones tend to develop three little toe-joints, which are immovable, but obviously are “petti-toes.” It is related by Suetonius that Julius Cæsar used to ride a favourite horse which had several toes on each foot with claws like a lion. This was one of the “monstrosities” alluded to above, a throw-back to the ancestral many-toed condition. Specimens illustrating these, and all else which I am here relating concerning horses, and much more which I have not space to tell, may be seen in the North Hall of the Natural History Museum.
Fig. 11.—Skulls of horses and of deer to show the pre-orbital pit or cups pf, and its absence in the Mongolian (Prevalsky’s) horse.