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.