nearly all the numerous species of snakes there are no vestiges of limbs
at all; but in the python we find beneath the skin very tiny rudiments
of the hind limbs. Now, is it a worthy conception of Deity that, while
neglecting to maintain His unity of ideal in the case of nearly all the
numerous species of snakes, He should have added a tiny rudiment in the
case of the python, and even in that case should have maintained His
ideal type very inefficiently, inasmuch as only two limbs instead of
four are represented? Or, again, take the case of the limb in other
animals. Five toes seem to constitute the ideal type, notwithstanding
that in numberless cases this ideal fails in its structural expression.
Now, in the case of the horse, one toe appears to have become developed
at the expense of the others; for the so-called knee of the horse is
really the wrist or ankle, and the so-called shank the middle toe or
finger very much enlarged. But on each side of this enlarged toe there
are, beneath the skin, rudimentary bones of two other toes--the
so-called splint-bones. So far good, but three toes are not five; so
special creationists must suppose that while in this case the Deity has,
so to speak, struggled to maintain the uniformity of His ideal, His
efforts have nevertheless conspicuously failed. How much less strained
is the scientific interpretation; for I may mention that in this
particular case, besides the general inference that rudiments point us
to a remote ancestry, we have direct palaeontological evidence that there
have been a whole series of extinct horse-like animals, that began low
down in the geological strata with five toes (on the fore-feet, one
being rudimentary), which afterwards became reduced to four and then to
three; after which the two lateral toes began to become rudimentary, as
we now see them in oxen, and later on still more so. Lastly, as we come
nearer to recent times, we find fossils of the existing horse, with the
lateral toes shortened up to the condition of splint-bones. Thus we have
some half-dozen different genera of horse, all standing in a linear
series in time as in structure, between the earliest representative with
the typical number of five toes, and the existing very aberrant form
with only one toe.

It is sometimes said that a striking corroboration of a scientific
theory is furnished when it enables us correctly to _predict_
discoveries. Such a corroboration is afforded in this instan