Well, this term, Animal Pedometers, is used here not for proving anything, but for the purpose of impressing on the mind of the reader the fact of certain patterns on the horse’s skin being intimately related to its locomotive life which, I hope I may assume, has been sufficiently demonstrated in this chapter. A pedometer is one of those works of men devised for his physical and mental advancement which are marked by a precision as well as purpose often absent from Nature’s handiwork. Just as a pedestrian, cyclist, or motorist carries with him his pedometer and tells you with some pride the number of miles he has “done” in a day or hour, so the horse displays _urbé et orbi_ his rougher registers of the locomotive triumphs of his ancestors and himself, and these I call Animal Pedometers by way of metaphor, and patterns by way of fact.
The less striking and rarer patterns of the horse’s hair have been fully described elsewhere,[51] and it would serve no useful end to refer to them at length, nor to multiply proofs of the position here maintained.
[51] _Direction of Hair in Animals and Man._
The even-toed section of hoofed animals is a much larger group than the odd-toed, and the difference may be illustrated by looking at the great work on Natural History by Lydekker. There are 273 pages given up to this group and only 112 to the odd-toed, and when we remember that there are contained in it the hippopotamus, all the pigs, oxen, sheep, goats, antelopes, camels, llamas, giraffes and deer, we can see that Lydekker was well justified in the great amount of space devoted to them. But we all have our different forms of _penchant_, and I propose to say very much less about this section than about the other represented by the domestic horse. It is well to claim the shelter of a great name in such an apportionment of interest, and Professor Poulton has given a clear precedent in his great book called _Essays on Evolution_. It contains 393 pages and even though the subject of the work is Evolution, he has given up 330 pages approximately, or five-sixths, of his space to insects. This can be gathered from a rough analysis of his various essays, and no one need blame a great biologist for having a _penchant_ for the subject he knows best, or a small one for writing of that he knows a little.