138 ORGANIC EVOLUTION CONSIDERED 



mammals show that they were evolved. The geolog- 

 ical history of the horse is to the evolutionist a source 

 of perennial delight. It has indeed become a veri- 

 table hobby-horse, which he delights to ride and to 

 which he points with pride as an unanswerable argu- 

 ment. 



The Eocene horse, which was about as large as a 

 fox, had four toes in front and three behind; the 

 Miocene horse had three toes and a splint in front, 

 and three behind; the Pliocene horse gradually lost 

 the two toes at the side, until they were represented 

 by splints, leaving only the middle toe, as in the 

 horse of to-day. Why did he lose these toes? If the 

 modern evolutionist had been geologically contem- 

 poraneous with the horse we would say that the latter 

 had lost his toes by being hardly ridden up and down 

 the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. 



It may be a question as to whether the horse has 

 been evolved, as claimed. Le Conte says: "About 

 thirty-five or forty species of this family, ranging 

 from the earliest Eocene to the Quaternary, are 

 known in the United States."* This number of 

 known species would, according to the assumptions of 

 evolutionists as to the proportion of lost forms, indi- 

 cate the existence of hundreds, if not thousands, of 

 species within the above period. If this is true, how 

 do we know that the Miocene horse of three toes did 

 not exist in the Eocene, and that the Pliocene horse 

 of only one toe did not exist in both Miocene and 

 Eocene? For the purposes of evolution the known 

 record is presumed to be quite sufficient, and this, in 

 spite of the fact that, according to the claims of that 

 theory, most of the record is unknown. 



But, granting that the horse did gradually lose 

 three of his toes and that his teeth underwent a cer- 



* Elements of Geology, p. 832. 



