useless things about us—all sorts of little things that are no use
to us at all and no use to half the animals that have them. But they
are useful to the other half, and we all have to be in the fashion.
Among these is a strange sort of single eye, set in the middle of
the head, so that we really have three eyes instead of two. Our
third eye is no bigger than a pea, and it lies tucked away between
the two sides of the brain, well inside the skull, where it cannot
possibly see anything. All the four-footed creatures have it. But in
none of them is it the slightest use, except in certain lizards,
especially in one in New Zealand, where it is a real eye placed in
the middle of the forehead between the other two. Several American
lizards also have this extra eye, though it isn’t good for much
seeing, among them the “horned toad” of California, which of course
isn’t a toad at all. So, just because a few lizards want three eyes
to see with, the rest of the four-footed animals and we human beings
have to have an extra eye that we don’t want, tucked away in pitch
darkness inside our heads.
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.
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.
[Illustration: Early man scratched pictures of the mammoth on pieces
of its own bones.]
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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
They find out in Wyoming, also, the bones of another creature that
has been called “the father of cats”—_Patriofelis_ as they say it in
Latin. But the father of cats is also a great deal like a seal, and
something like an otter—at least he used to take readily to the
water, as our modern cats certainly do not.
In short, if any of us had lived in North America at a time not so
very long before the first human beings actually did live somewhere
on the earth, we should be surely put to it to tell one sort of
beast from another. The horses looked like dogs, and the dogs looked
like cats, and the cats looked like seals, and there were pigs that
looked like wolves, and camels that suggested sheep, to say nothing
of cows that you couldn’t tell from deer. Each beast used to be a
general mixture of all beasts, and only since there have been men in
the world have the beasts changed into all the various sorts which
we know.
[Illustration: Extinct Reptiles, which looked like a mixture of
Alligator, Rhinoceros and Kangaroo, but their Bones were more like
the Bones of Birds.]
The snakes used to have legs. In fact, a snake is not much more than
a lizard that has left off his legs for the sake of crawling into
smaller holes. But the snakes and lizards are much older than the
beasts; so that there were plenty of both in the world long before
there were horses and cows and dogs and cats and all the rest of the
beasts with fur—and still longer, naturally, before there were any
elephants or men.
The early birds, too, were a good deal like lizards. They had teeth
like a crocodile, and long tails with feathers stuck in the sides,
and tho they had wings like a proper bird, they had also claws on
their wings, which were really three-fingered hands with feathers
growing on them. But even our modern birds still keep the old lizard
scales on their legs, tho they have long ago changed them to
feathers on their bodies.
It is exactly the same with our own ancestors as with the ancestors
of any beast or bird or reptile. The bones of early men are still
found in the caves of Europe, mixed with the bones of the animals
which they ate, and buried in the earth and stone that have fallen
from the roof. These men were true and proper human beings, who
walked on their hind legs and, I suppose, talked. But they were not
quite such men as we are, for their skulls were a little flatter on
top, the bony ridges over their eyes were a little heavier and their
teeth a little larger.
These ancient men, like nearly all Indians before White Men came,
and for that matter, like our own prehistoric ancestors in Europe,
had no metal tools, and used only stone for hammers, axes, and
arrowheads. So there are found, all over Europe, vast numbers of
stone tools and weapons, cruder as they are older, until the very
earliest are only common pebbles that have been banged by use.
No skeletons are known of these early men, but only skulls, commonly
a good deal broken. So we do not know very much about these people.
But for the most part the hollow in the brain-case is just a trifle
larger over the left ear, as if even they had a speech center, were
right-handed, and could talk.
On the other hand, some very ancient apes had skulls and teeth more
like ours than any modern gorilla or chimpanzee ever has. So it
seems to be a general rule that, just as young animals and plants
tend to be more like one another than they will be when they grow
up, so very ancient creatures tend to be less unlike each other than
their present-day descendants are.
LI
Something Nobody Understands
Now, my reader, we have come to the last chapter of this book, which
is going to be the hardest chapter of all, and I think, the most
important. For though it is going to be about something that nobody
quite understands, and something that the more one thinks about, the
more he doesn’t understand it, nevertheless it is something that you
will have to think about many times in your lives hereafter, and you
might as well make a beginning. Besides, though you won’t understand
all that I am going to say—largely I am afraid, because I don’t
understand it myself—still I trust that you will remember some of
it; and by and by when you are sorely puzzled over these matters,
perhaps it will help you out.
If you will think back over what I have already told you in this
book about animals and plants, and recall also what you have
yourselves seen, and what you have learned about your own bodies and
the way they work, I think you will agree with me, that of all the
strange and wonderful things in this most strange and wonderful
world, a living thing is the strangest and the most wonderful.
Think, for example, how a little egg, no bigger, it may be, than the
head of a pin, with no help from outside, except perhaps a little
fresh air and a little warmth, just goes ahead and makes itself over
into a grown animal. Consider, too, how well it does the job—every
scale and feather and tooth and bone and gland and muscle and claw
and nail and blood vessel and nerve and hair, all just in the right
place, and just of the right size. When one builds a house, the
owner consults the architect, and the architect advises with the
contractor, and the contractor puts some of the work on the
sub-contractor, and the contractor and the sub-contractors direct
the workmen; and among them, in a year or so, they manage to get the
house together. But in the world of living things, one little fleck
of living protoplasm goes ahead all by itself, and builds a whole
living animal, sometimes in a few days. Yet there are more different
parts to be made and fitted together in one of your little fingers,
than in any common dwelling house, even tho you count the laths
behind the plastering and the shingles on the roof—yes, and the
nails that hold them on. As for your brains, they are, each one of
them, for complexity, like all the parts of all the houses in a
fair-sized city, with all the furniture, and all the tableware, and
all the pots and pans in all the kitchens thrown in for good
measure. If you think that a watch or a battleship is a complicated
affair, think what goes on in the brain of a tiny ant.
Think, too, how resourceful an egg is. It tries its best to grow
into a proper animal; but if somebody interferes, to prevent that,
then the egg goes pluckily ahead and makes the best it can of a bad
matter. If it gets jarred apart so that it cannot make one animal,
why then it makes two, or four, or eight. When it can make neither
one animal nor two proper and separate twins, it doesn’t give up,
but makes some sort of double monster, that at least manages to keep
alive. For my own part, I feel a sincere respect for eggs. I wish
more of us had their pertinacity.
After the egg has made itself into a grown animal, consider how well
fitted out that animal is. It has, usually, eyes, nose, mouth, ears,
sense of touch, of heat and cold, of taste, and the rest. It has
born in it the instincts to find its proper food, to find or build
its shelter, to take care of its young, to escape its enemies, and
in general to like the things which it is best for it to do. Yet if
it doesn’t happen to have these sense organs and instincts and the
rest, still it always has something nearly as good, and manages
somehow to get its living in the world.
Yet I sometimes think that the most extraordinary thing about living
things, both animals and plants, is the enormous number of different
kinds of them. There are some twenty different sorts of cats, of
various sizes from lions down; and twice as many different sorts of
dogs, wolves, foxes and other dog-like creatures. There are
thirty-two different kinds of willow trees in North America,
thirty-six different kinds of pine trees, Sixty-three different
oaks. As for insects, about three hundred thousand different sorts
have already been given names; and there are at least ten times as
many more that are still nameless. Do you know how many different
races of men there are that you can tell apart by their
looks?—Chinamen, Negroes, White men, Tartars, Eskimo, Indians,
Malays, Arabs, and I don’t know how many more, all alike in being
human, and yet all different.
Why there should be such a lot of different animals and plants and
men is something that nobody fully understands. We do know, however,
and know very certainly, that there haven’t always been all these
various sorts in the world. If we could go back a sufficient number
of thousand years, we should come to a time when, instead of twenty
sorts of cat, there were only ten. Back of that, was a still more
ancient time when there were only five. A long time before even that
early day, there was only _Patriofelis_, “the father of cats,” and
even he, as you know, was also a good deal like a seal.
So too there must once have been a “father of dogs” whose
descendants have changed, some into proper dogs, and some into
wolves, and some into foxes, and some into jackals, coyotes, dingos,
fennecs, and the rest of the forty-odd sorts of wild dogs—to say
nothing of all the various tame dogs, collies and terriers and
mastiffs and bull dogs and setters, that you can count up for
yourselves.
Once too, there was only one kind of man. He probably lived
somewhere in southern Asia, and spread out from there, till he
possessed the whole earth. Some of him went south-east into the
Pacific Islands, and changed into Malays and Australians. Some of
him went south-west into Africa and became Negroes. Some became
Persians, Egyptians, Hindus, and Arabs. Those that kept on further
and entered Europe turned various shades of white and became us. For
very few white men are really white—only certain Swedes and
Norwegians and Danes. The rest of us, who call ourselves white, are
merely not quite so black as our very-many-times-great-grandfathers
and our somewhat distant cousins, the Negroes.
Most of these early men, however, started north-east; and because
they couldn’t very well cross the great mountains and deserts in
central Asia, they ran round the eastern end, and then came back on
the other side. On their way, they turned to Chinamen and Japanese.
Those that got way up to the north under the Arctic circle became
Eskimos. Some of them crossed over by way of Siberia and Alaska (for
these countries have not always been as cold as they are now) and
turned into American Indians.