Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/302

288 am now showing you is separable from the rest, and only unites as the animal becomes older, and this is, in point of fact, the lower extremity of the ulna; so that we may say that in the horse the middle part of the ulna becomes rudimentary and unites with the radius, and that the lower extremity of the ulna is so early united with the lower extremity of the radius that every distinct trace of separation has vanished in the adult.

I need not trouble you with the structure of this portion that answers to the wrist, nor with a more full description of the singular peculiarities of the part, because we can do without them for the present, but I will go on to a consideration of the remarkable series of bones which terminates the fore-limb. We have one continuous series in the middle line which terminates in the coffin-bone of the horse upon which the weight of the fore-part of the body is supported. This series answers to a finger of my hand, and there are good reasons—perfectly valid and convincing reasons, which I need not stay to trouble you with—which prove that this answers to the third finger of my hand enormously enlarged.

And it looks at first as if there were only this one finger in the horse's foot. But, if I turn the skeleton round, I find on each side a bone shaped like a splint, broad at the upper and narrow at the lower end, one on each side. And those bones are obviously and plainly and can be readily shown to be the rudiments of the bones which I am now touching in my own hand—the metacarpal bones of the second and of the fourth finger—so that we may say that in the horse's fore-limb the radius and ulna are fused together, that the middle part of the ulna is excessively narrow, and that the foot is reduced to the single middle finger, with rudiments of the two other fingers, one on each side of it. Those facts are represented in the diagram I now show you of the recent horse. Here is the fore-limb (pointing to the diagram), with the metacarpal bones and the little splint-bones, one on each side. It sometimes happens that by way of a monstrosity you may have an existing horse with one or other of these toes that is, provided with its terminal joints.

Let me now point out to you what are the characteristics of the hind-limb. This (pointing to the diagram) is the shin-bone of the horse, and it appears at first to constitute the whole of the leg. But there is a little splint at this point which is the rudiment of the small bone of the leg—what is called the fibula—and then there is connected with the lower end of the tibia a little nodule which represents the lower end of the fibula, in just the same way as that little nodule in the fore-limb represents the lower end of the ulna. So that in the leg we have a modification of the same character as that which exists in the fore-limb—the suppression of the greater part of the small bone of the leg and the union of its lower end with the tibia. So, again, we find the same thing if we turn to the remainder of the leg.