the horse still reveals to us that he belongs to the three-toed animals.[167]

Now while these changes in the toes were going on, the space between the front teeth and eye-teeth gradually increased, till we arrive at the large gap now seen in the horse and ass (see Fig. 67). The chief bone of the fore arm (radius) increased in size, and the other bone (ulna) became joined to it, and the same in the hind leg. The brain increased in size mainly in the front part, and the body grew much larger, improving in form and build, till the long, slender, flexible legs became the perfection of running and galloping limbs such as we find in the zebra of to-day, poised upon a strong jointed toe, with its last joint broadened into a firm pad, and covered with a thick nail—the hoof. We have only to compare the well-proportioned leg of a horse with the thick, strong, clumsy leg of an elephant, to see, on the one hand, what a shapely and beautiful limb it has become; while, on the other hand, if we put it by the side of a giraffe’s leg, we must acknowledge at once that it is a far

Footnote 167. The genealogy of the horse is so important, that it may be well to give a table of the seven principal stages, though transitions are known even between these.

| | | | | | | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | | Period. | In America. | Front Toes. | Hind Toes. | No. of Teeth. | In Europe. | | 7. | Recent and Upper Pliocene | -- Equus | 1 --------- 2 splints | 1 --------- 2 splints | 40 | Equus. Equus. | | 6. | Upper Pliocene | Pliohippus | 1 --------- 2 splints | 1 --------- 2 splints | 42 | -- | | 5. | Lower Pliocene | Protohippus | 1 large -------- 2 small | 1 large --------- 2 small | 44 | Hipparion. | | 4. | Upper Miocene | Miohippus | 3 | 3 | 44 | Anchitherium. | | 3. | Lower Miocene | Mesohippus | 3 -------- 1 splint | 3 | 44 | -- | | 2. | Upper Eocene | Orohippus | 4 | 3 | 44 | -- | | 1. | Lower Eocene | Eohippus | 4 -------- 1 splint | 3 | 44 | -- | stronger and more serviceable limb than if it had gone to the other extreme. There can be no doubt that when the horse arrived at this point of the strong single hoof and well-shaped body, he had a wide range over the world, both Old and New; but curiously enough, while in Asia and Africa the tribe branched out into many forms, such as asses, quaggas and zebras, in America it died out, so that till we found the fossil-forms,[168] it was thought that no horses had ever been there till they were brought by the Spaniards.

Meanwhile, in the Old World, they must have led as free and joyous a life as those horses do now which have run wild in Tartary and America, galloping, frolicking, feeding, and neighing to each other with delight, as they roamed over the wide plains in troops of thousands, for solitary wanderers they would soon have fallen a prey to wolves or jaguars; and if the mothers wished to protect their foals they had to learn to follow one leader and act together in time of danger.

“A thousand horse, the wild, the free,

Like waves that follow o’er the sea,

Headed by one black mighty steed

Who seemed the patriarch of his breed,”

they grew accustomed, as generations passed on, to unite against their common foes, placing the mares and their foals in the centre when attacked, while the fathers met the enemy with hoofs and teeth. And so they became intelligent and tractable even in their wild state, to those of their own kind, and laid the foundation of those noble qualities of which man now reaps the benefit.

Footnote 168. See table, above.

But the horses were not the only group which combined in this way for protection. The third great line of hoofed animals, those which have “cloven” feet of two toes, and which “chew the cud,” have learnt many a lesson of vigilance, fidelity, and affection, by their social habits. Everyone has read of the herds of antelopes or deer, where the sentinels stand faithfully watching while their companions feed, and stamp or whistle when danger is near; while in the herds of wild cattle, not only will the mothers keep a watchful look-out for danger, but the bulls will join to protect the young ones at the risk of their own lives. Mr. Allen relates how, in America, a young bison, which had strayed from the troop and was followed by wolves, was surrounded by a number of old bulls, who, facing about, warily conducted him across the plain till he was safely among the dense mass of buffaloes, which the wolves dared not attack.

Now these “ruminant” animals, with complicated stomachs and the power of feeding at long intervals, have spread far and wide over the earth under many different forms, and while some are still very numerous, others are now rare, or almost destroyed.

Take, for example, the Camel, the true “child of the desert.” There are no wild camels left now, so long has man conquered and tamed this useful beast of burden. But in past ages vast numbers of camel-like forms lived in North America, which found their way on the one hand to the south, where the Llamas, Alpacas, and Guanacos now feed on the mountains of Peru and Chili, while on the other they travelled over Northern Asia to the deserts of Africa and Arabia, and there became those curious desert-animals which the Arabs used and still use as their beasts of burden. A strange old fellow is the camel, with his two-toed hairy feet, with only nail-hoofs upon them, and his hard pads on his thighs and legs, on which he rests when he lies or kneels. His curious fleshy hump, which is single in the true camel or dromedary and double in the Bactrian camel, serves him as a special provision of fat, and it dwindles when he is short of food, recovering its size and firmness when he is full-fed again; and he is the only cud-chewing animal which has kept his front teeth and defends himself with them, having no horns.

Fig. 69.

The true Camel (Camelus Dromedarius).

Still more strange in some ways are the giraffes,[169] of which we know very little, except that large forms like them once wandered in Europe.[170] For they, with only the same number of bones as other animals, have these so lengthened out that, as they wander in the tropical forests, their slender legs raise them above all other animals, and their long neck, which nevertheless has only seven joints like all the milk-givers, enables them to reach the high trees, so as to strip off the leaves with their ribbon-like tongues.

But we should want much space to discuss such curious forms as these, and we need not go further than the ordinary deer of our parks to read a strange history of how life has gradually armed her children. The giraffe with his long neck to feed, and his wide straggling legs to fly swiftly from danger, has only short hairy covered knobs on his forehead for horns. But the stag, who is obliged to fight, especially when he wishes to secure his wives, has antlers so branched and so heavy that it is a wonder that his neck can carry them.

Now it is in the autumn that the stags fight and struggle together to secure the leadership of the does, and it is then that their antlers are finest and strongest, and they remain so during the whole winter. But when the early spring comes, the bone of the antlers dries up near the head, where there is a little ridge round it, and soon they fall off, a skin forms over the place, and new ones begin to grow. Then as the little knobs push forward and increase, how lovely they are, for the skin covered with soft hair is all over them, carrying the network

Footnote 169. Cameleopardalis.

Footnote 170. See heading of chapter.

of blood-vessels which secrete the bone within. So fast do they grow that antlers weighing seventy-two pounds will be complete in ten weeks, and when they are finished, the “velvet,” as this soft skin is called, dries up, and they rip it off against a tree, leaving the bare bone.

Fig. 70.

The Red-deer with branching antlers.[171]—(After Ridinger).

Thus equipped, the stag is a match for the world, and he knows it; his bearing is proud and haughty, and instead of flying from danger he will turn round and fight fiercely when attacked. And now comes the curious part of his history. In the different stags

Footnote 171. Compare this with the Deer with the one-spiked antler in the picture heading.

of the world we see all kinds of antlers, from one single spike like a stiletto in some American stags, to the superb antlers of the Red-deer, some of which have as many as sixty-six spikes. But when the red-deer begins to grow his antlers, he does not get this splendid tree in the first year, he has only a single spike; this falls off, and the next year he grows them with a second branch; the third year both branches become doubled and another appears, and so each year as he grows them afresh they are more and more complicated, till at last the whole branched tree grows up in a few months. Now in thus increasing his spikes year by year, he is in his own person most curiously retracing the steps of his ancestors in ages past; for, as we have seen, the first deerlike animals had no horns, then as the ages passed on we find that they had single spikes; later on, their descendants grew antlers of two branches, and later still more complicated ones, so that the race put on little by little those magnificent antlers which now the red-deer and others carry, and meanwhile the various species spread all over the world, except into Australia and Africa, south of the desert.

Still, even the stags have times in the year, before their antlers are grown, when they are comparatively defenceless. There remains yet another branch of the “ruminant” family, even better provided with weapons. These are the antelopes, wild cattle, and buffaloes, for with them the horns never fall off. The reason of this is that they grow in quite a different manner from the stags’ antlers. Instead of the bone being laid down by the skin, it grows out as a core from the forehead, and the skin over it hardens into horn as it grows, so that the tip of a bull’s horns is the oldest part.

Fig. 71.

A Buffalo cow defending her calf.—(Livingstone.)

Here then we can have no branching as in the stag, but on the other hand a firm and terrible weapon increasing from year to year; and even the king of the beasts, the lion, when he attacks a large buffalo, is often seriously wounded for his pains. We should not wonder then if these animals had conquered the world wherever man had not destroyed them; but strange to say, they have kept chiefly to the old world, for none have travelled to South America, and only the Bisons have overrun North America with their vast herds. All the rest, buffaloes, wild cattle, antelopes, gazelles, goats and sheep, have made their home in Europe, Asia, and Africa,

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