148 THE HORSE AND HIS PEDIGREE. 



saiy toes, which do not reach the ground at all, 

 exactly as is the case with the small side-trotters 

 or dew-claws of the pig and the deer in our own 

 day. Next we find these useless side-toes slowly 

 coalescing with the chief bone of the one central 

 toe or hoof, till at last they remain in our own 

 modern horses and donkeys only as those lateral 

 knobs known to veterinaries as the splint-bones. 

 To the very last, however, the lioise retains in his 

 existing skeleton the faint marks of the time 

 when his ancestors possessed at least three dis- 

 tinct toes; and his present solid solitary hoof has 

 been gradually developed in the long course of 

 scouring over the open i)lains which form in the 

 free wild state the natund dwelling-place of all 

 his kind. Indeed, even at the present day the 

 fully developed horse still shows at times a ten- 

 dency to " throw back " to the primitive form of 

 his remoter ancestry, and cases are on record of 

 horses having been born with three distinct toes 

 on each foot, after precisely the same simple fash- 

 ion as their early geological progenitors. 



Even more interesting, perha[)s, than these 

 remoter chapters in the ancestry of the horse are 

 the traces which he still occasionally manifests in 

 his outward ap[)earance of his direct descent in 

 later times from a stri})ed and banded asinine ani- 

 mal like the modern zebra. There can be little 

 doubt that, at the point when the horse family, in 



