A VERY OLD MASTER 115 



fragments of skeletons now preserved to us also indicate 

 that our old master and his contemporaries much resembled 

 in shape and build the Australian black fellows, though 

 their foreheads were lower and more receding, while their 

 front teeth still projected in huge fangs, faintly recalling 

 the immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart 

 from any theoretical considerations as to our probable 

 descent (or ascent) from Mr. Darwin's hypothetical ' hairy 

 arboreal quadrumanous ancestor,' whose existence may or 

 may not be really true, there can be no doubt that the 

 actual historical remains set before us pre-Glacial man as 

 evidently approaching in several important respects the 

 higher monkeys. 



It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the 

 Time still retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many 

 traces of the old monkey-like progenitor, the horses which 

 our old master has so cleverly delineated for us on his 

 scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the earlier 

 united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has 

 admirably reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, 

 beginning with a little creature from the Eocene beds of 

 New Mexico, with five toes to each hind foot, and ending 

 with the modern horse, whose hoof is now practically re- 

 duced to a single and solid-nailed toe. Intermediate stages 

 show us an Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four 

 toes on his front feet and three behind ; a Miocene kind as 

 big as a sheep, with only three toes on the front foot, the 

 two outer of which are smaller than the big middle one ; 

 and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one 

 stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller 

 ones, too short by far to reach the ground. In our own 

 horse these lateral toes have become reduced to what are 

 known by veterinaries as splint bones, combined with the 

 canon in a single solidly morticed piece. But in the pre- 



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