Concerning Animals and Other Matters | Page 9

Saladin, keeping the keenness of its edge in a velvet sheath
and flashing out only on the field of battle. Compare that paw with the
foot of a dog, and you will, perhaps, see with me that the servility and
pliancy of the slave of man has usurped a place in his esteem which is
not its due. The cat is much the nobler animal. Dogs, with wolves,
jackals, and all of their kin, love to fall upon their victim in
overwhelming force, like a rascally mob, and bite, tear, and worry until
the life has gone out of it; the tiger, rushing single-handed, with a
fearful challenge, on the gigantic buffalo, grasps its nose with one paw
and its shoulder with the other, and has broken its massive neck in a
manner so dexterous and instantaneous that scarcely two sportsmen can
agree about how the thing is done.
I have said that the foot first appeared when the backboned creatures
came out of the waters to live upon the dry land. But all mundane
things (not excepting politics) tend to move in circles, ending where
they began; and so the foot, if we follow it far enough, will take us
back into water. See how the rat--I mean our common, omnivorous,
scavenging, thieving, poaching brown rat--when it lives near a pond or

stream, learns to swim and dive as naturally as a duck. Next comes the
vole, or water-rat, which will not live away from water. Then there are
water shrews, the beaver, otter, duck-billed platypus, and a host of
others, not related, just as, among birds, there are water ousels,
moorhens, ducks, divers, etc., which have permanently made the water
their home and seek their living in it. All these have attained to
web-footedness in a greater or less degree.
That this has occurred among reptiles, beasts, and birds alike shows
what an easy, or natural, or obvious (put it as you will) modification it
is. And it has a consequence not to be escaped. Just as a man who rides
a great deal and never walks acquires a certain indirectness of the legs,
and you never mistake a jockey for a drill-sergeant, so the web-footed
beasts are not among the things that are "comely in going."
Following this road you arrive at the seal and sea-lion. Of all the feet
that I have looked at I know only one more utterly ridiculous than the
twisted flipper on which the sea-lion props his great bulk in front, and
that is the forked fly-flap which extends from the hinder parts of the
same. How can it be worth any beast's while to carry such an absurd
apparatus with it just for the sake of getting out into the air sometimes
and pushing itself about on the ice and being eaten by Polar bears? The
porpoise has discarded one pair, turned the other into decent fins, and
recovered a grace and power of motion in water which are not equalled
by the greyhound on land. Why have the seals hung back? I believe I
know the secret. It is the baby! No one knows where the porpoise and
the whale cradle their newborn infants--it is so difficult to pry into the
domestic ways of these sea-people--but evidently the seals cannot
manage it, so they are forced to return to the land when the cares of
maternity are on them.
I have called the feet of these sea beasts ridiculous things, and so they
are as we see them; but strip off the skin, and lo! there appears a plain
foot, with its five digits, each of several joints, tipped with
claws--nowise essentially different, in short, from that with which the
toad, or frog, first set out in a past too distant for our infirm imagination.
Admiration itself is paralysed by a contrivance so simple, so

transmutable, and so sufficient for every need that time and change
could bring.
There remains yet one transformation which seems simple compared
with some that I have noticed, but is more full of fate than they all; for
by it the foot becomes a hand. This comes about by easy stages. The
reason why one of a bird's four toes is turned back is quite plain: trees
are the proper home of birds, and they require feet that will grasp
branches. So those beasts also that have taken to living in trees have got
one toe detached more or less from the rest and arranged so that it can
co-operate with them to catch hold of a thing. Then other changes
quickly follow. For, in judging whether you have got hold of a thing
and how much force you must put forth to keep hold of it, you are
guided entirely by the pressure on the finger-points,