Part 30

So the little fish, while still in the egg, has these gill slits in the side of his head because later, when he gets hatched out and swims round, he is going to use them to breathe with. But the little chick in the egg, after his lower jaw has begun to grow, also has these same gill slits in the side of his neck, although when he hatches out, he is going to breathe with lungs, and is never going to have the least use for gills. So, too, do little puppies and kittens and colts and calves and all the land animals that breathe with lungs and haven’t the slightest use for any such holes.

Sometimes the hole doesn’t even break clear through. It starts from the inside and comes out, and from the outside and goes in, but the two tunnels never quite meet, and the hole never gets really open. But whether the holes open through or not, they soon close up again, and leave no sign that they have ever been there at all.

All except the first hole on each side, the one nearest the mouth. That never closes again, but remains open and becomes the hole into the ear. There is a hole in from the outside, as you know, the one you used to put beans and pencils in, only you oughtn’t. And there is another hole from the inside, beginning high up in the throat just where you can’t see it, and running in till it almost joins the other hole. Between the two is just a thin skin, which is the “drum” of the ear, and if you get a hole in it you may never be able to hear again. Because this drum never grew. It is the place that remained after one tunnel came in from outside, and another from inside, and the two didn’t quite meet.

So it comes about that all of us land creatures with backbones, who breathe with lungs, start making gill slits which we can’t possibly use. Then, because we have them on hand, we use the one farthest in front for the hole of the ear, and close the rest up again. And we take all that trouble—though it doesn’t trouble us much at the time—just because various other backboned creatures, which live in the water and don’t have lungs, had to make gill slits to breathe with.

There are a lot of things of this sort—parts and organs and members which one creature, while it is in the egg, makes and doesn’t use, just because some other creature, when it grew up, had to have them. You know what a short tail a hen or a turkey or a pigeon has—just a stub of a tail, only just big enough to stick its tail feathers in. But a little hen or turkey or pigeon, while it is still in the egg, has a tail like other animals, long enough to wag.

There is a kind of salamander, which is unlike most salamanders, efts, newts, and the like—these are all pretty much the same thing, and you find them almost anywhere in the brooks and the ponds and the damp woods. All of these that you are ever likely to see breathe with gills like a fish, and can live in the water. Only instead of having their gills covered over with a bony plate like the fish, these creatures often have them outside, like a sort of lace collar that hangs down at the side of their necks. Tom, the chimney sweep, in Charles Kingsley’s famous tale, after he turned into a water baby, had just such tufted gills so that he could swim under water like any newt or eft, and if you haven’t read “The Water Babies,” it’s certainly high time you did.

What I started to say is that this particular kind of salamander lives on the land. So he doesn’t need gills and doesn’t have them. But the little salamander, while he is still in the egg, has gills like any salamander, though for all the use he can ever put them to, he might just as well have been furnished with a pair of skates; for by the time he hatches out of the egg, the gills have been taken to pieces by his white corpuscles and the stuff used to make some other part of the body.

All the same, if you break open the egg, take the little creature out, and put him in the water while he still has gills, he will swim away, and live under water as well as any water creature. But if you wait till he hatches out of himself and has lost his gills, then if you put him in the water, he will drown just as you would. So the little salamander, that is going to spend his life on dry land, still has gills while he is in the egg and has no use for them, all just because other salamanders that live some of the time in the water need gills to breathe with.

Then there are the snakes, which have lungs and breathe air like any land animal. Only a snake is so very slender that there isn’t room in him for two lungs side by side. So he has only one proper lung, very long and thin, that runs from his neck pretty well down to his tail. Nevertheless, the snakes still keep the other lung, small and quite useless, tucked away beside the front end of the one they do use. Other reptiles have two lungs, so the snakes have to have two lungs also, though they can’t possibly use them both, and the other which they don’t use, merely takes up room.

We human beings are just as bad as the rest. Every little while, somebody comes down with appendicitis and has to be taken to the hospital to have his “vermiform appendix” taken out. The appendix isn’t the slightest use to anybody, we are better off without it, but in cows and dogs and rabbits and kangaroos, and various other animals, especially those that eat grass and leaves, it is a good deal of use for helping to digest food. So we have to have it, to be like the rest—and then pay the doctor to cut it off.

We don’t move our ears as horses and dogs and rabbits do. But still the muscles are there; and people say that anybody who wanted to take the trouble could learn to wag his ears like a baboon. Anyhow, the muscles are there, though we don’t use them and other creatures do.

We are said to have no fewer than one hundred and eighty such useless things about us—all sorts of little things that are no use to us at all and no use to half the animals that have them. But they are useful to the other half, and we all have to be in the fashion. Among these is a strange sort of single eye, set in the middle of the head, so that we really have three eyes instead of two. Our third eye is no bigger than a pea, and it lies tucked away between the two sides of the brain, well inside the skull, where it cannot possibly see anything. All the four-footed creatures have it. But in none of them is it the slightest use, except in certain lizards, especially in one in New Zealand, where it is a real eye placed in the middle of the forehead between the other two. Several American lizards also have this extra eye, though it isn’t good for much seeing, among them the “horned toad” of California, which of course isn’t a toad at all. So, just because a few lizards want three eyes to see with, the rest of the four-footed animals and we human beings have to have an extra eye that we don’t want, tucked away in pitch darkness inside our heads.

But that’s the way things are managed—salt blood, and gill slits, tails and gills in the egg and not out, extra lungs for the snakes, and extra eyes for us all, like Little Three Eyes in the story. It’s like the extra legs and tails on the lizard, and the extra heads on the planarian. Nature gets started making things, and doesn’t seem to be able to stop.

XLIX

Horses’ Fingers

The horse does have fingers—as one can easily see by counting up the parts of his legs. Let’s start with the fore-leg, and begin at the top next the body.

The sharp ridge just in front of the place where the saddle goes, between that and the beginning of the mane, is mostly backbone, the same part that we feel under our coat collars at the backs of our necks. The horse’s shoulders, against which the collar rests when he pulls his load, are mostly shoulder-blades, for the chest of all four-footed beasts is narrow, and the shoulder-blades, instead of being on their backs, as ours are, are at their sides. The upper arm, between the shoulder and elbow is short, and is buried in muscle so that one doesn’t notice it. So the first joint that shows, where the fore-leg joins the body, is not the shoulder but the elbow. The upper half of the arm is inside the skin.

The upper half of the horse’s fore-leg, then, is our fore-arm, between elbow and wrist; and sure enough, that bone in the horse is double just as it is in us, and in all animals that can twist their hands round, tho the double bone isn’t the slightest use to the horse. What we call the horse’s knee, then, is his wrist—and again, like our wrists, it has a lot of little bones which make our wrists supple so that we can bend them in all sorts of ways, but which also are no use at all to the horse.

Then there is the horse’s shin—which isn’t shin at all, but the palm-bone of the middle finger, which in us runs from the wrist to the knuckle. The rest of the leg is the middle finger, with the proper three joints, which every finger ought to have, and a gigantic finger nail, which is the hoof. So the horse has a hand, and a very large hand too; only he has lost all his fingers except one, so that he really stands up and runs on the nail of his middle finger. Nevertheless, the horse hasn’t quite lost the rest of his hand; because along the sides of this middle-finger-palm-bone, which we call the shin, lie two other little bones, too small to be any use, which are the palm-bones of the first finger and the third. But once in a long while a colt is born with two little hoofs on these bones, so that it has three fingers instead of one. The rhinoceros, on the other hand, has three fingers, all nearly the same size; while the elephant keeps all five.

Now if you will notice the fore-leg of a cow, you will see that it is just about like that of a horse, till you get down to the wrist. Below that point, the cow, instead of having one palm-bone and one finger, has two. Of course, then, it has two finger nails. The deer has two fingers like the cow, and then two little ones besides, and so does the pig. But the hippopotamus has all four fingers and lacks only the thumb.

All of which, if you keep your eyes open, you can make out for yourselves and more. Only I wish somebody would tell me why all the animals that have horns at the side of their heads—cows and sheep and goats and deer and buffaloes and I don’t know what all—have either two fingers or four; and why the creatures that have one finger, or three fingers, or all five, never have such horns. That is something that nobody has yet been able to find out.

So much then for the horse’s hand—and what a whacking big hand it would be, by the way, if it did have all five fingers instead of only one! Let’s see what we can make out about the horse’s foot.

The thigh, as you can easily make out when the horse moves, starts close up to the tail, and like the upper arm, is almost wholly inside the skin. So the first joint that shows is the knee, and the great muscles which, as you sit behind to drive, you see pulling you along so strongly, are those of the calf of the leg. The joint that comes nearest the driver’s feet, which we call the gambrel, is then the heel. It certainly does look like a heel; and the rest of the leg is the middle one of the five long bones of the foot, with the middle toe on the end of it. So the horse stands on the end of his middle toe, and his hind hoof is his middle toenail.

The cow, of course, keeps two toes with their foot-bones. The dog has four. I don’t think a dog ever puts his heel down so as to stand on the whole flat of his foot, except sometimes when he stands up to beg. But cats and rabbits often do, when they want to stand up on their hind legs to see as far as possible. Still they don’t do it enough to have soles to their feet all the way back to the heel. But the bears and the monkeys and a lot of other animals that can’t run very fast, do put the whole foot down on the ground, and do have a sole all the way back to the heel. In general, the faster an animal can run, the more it stands up on its fingers and toes, the longer its feet and hands are, the shorter its thighs and upper arms, and the fewer fingers and toes it has. That’s why the horse, which I suppose is about the fastest animal there is, has his fore-leg at least half hand, and his hind leg mostly foot.

Some learned men devote their entire lives to making out just this sort of correspondence between the various bones and muscles and other parts of one animal, and those of others and of man. A most fascinating game it is, too; and a game that everyone can play a little, and keep on playing as long as he lives and keeps learning more and more about animals.

How The Elephant Got His Trunk

According to the Just So Stories, in the high and far off times, before any elephant ever had any trunk, there was a certain Elephant’s Child who was afflicted with an insatiable curiosity. And after this Elephant’s Child had been spanked for this same insatiable curiosity by his tall aunt, the Ostrich, and by his tall uncle, the Giraffe, and by his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, and by his hairy uncle, the Baboon, grievously and frequently, without stopping, for a long time, he started out for the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, to see what the Crocodile has for dinner And the Crocodile caught the Elephant’s Child by the nose, which was just a common nose and not a trunk at all, and pulled and pulled and pulled, being minded to have Elephant’s Child for the beginning of his dinner. And the Elephant’s Child spread out his little four legs, and he pulled and pulled and pulled, until between them, they stretched out the Elephant’s Child’s nose into the first elephant’s trunk that ever was. So all other elephants have had such trunks ever since.

This is Mr. Kipling’s story of how the elephant got his trunk. This and several more like it of the Just So Stories, you must all read for yourselves, for altogether they are about as good stories as have been written by anybody this long time. Besides, something not so very different from this adventure of the Elephant’s Child did really happen. Only it didn’t happen in quite the same way; and instead of there being one Elephant’s Child, there were many, many, many, one after another for hundreds of years, each with a nose a little more stretched out and a little more trunk-like than those which came before it.