THE HORSE A BALLET DANCER. 



it for travelling, standing, and even sleeping. 

 If the ladies of the ballet should learn from 

 their trainer this lesson of evolution, they 

 might be led to redouble their assiduity in 

 practising their steps by the prospect of de- 

 veloping some of their toes into mere rudi- 

 ments, and so reducing the size of their feet ; 

 but a cautious teacher would not draw their 

 attention to the extent of the overgrowth, in the 

 horse's case, of the nails on those toes which 

 survive. 



The correspondence between the horse's 

 fore-leg and man's arm is much the same as 

 that between the other limbs. The upper joint 

 of the horse's limb, corresponding to our 

 shoulder, is not readily distinguishable from 

 the mass of the body. The first clearly visible 

 joint, answering to our elbow, is on a level 

 with the bottom of the horse's chest. What we 

 call the knee in the horse represents the human 

 wrist and carpus. The long bone running 

 straight down from the horse's knee takes the 

 place of the middle metacarpal, which can be 

 felt in the back of the human hand, our two 

 side-bones, as before, being represented in 

 the horse by mere ridges or rudimentary bones 

 running down the sides of the surviving central 

 bone. There are two more short bones, cor- 

 responding to the first and second parts of the 

 fingers and the hoof, an enlarged and thickened 

 nail, 



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