[3] This is also true of quadrupeds. It is the posterior part of the feet which is set down first.
[4] “According to Sainbell, the celebrated horse Eclipse, when galloping at liberty, and with its greatest speed, passed over the space of twenty-five feet at each stride, which he repeated 2-1/3 times in a second, being nearly four miles in six minutes and two seconds. The race-horse Flying Childers was computed to have passed over eighty-two feet and a half in a second, or nearly a mile in a minute.”
In the swimming of the fish, the body is thrown into double or figure-of-8 curves, as in the walking of the biped. The twisting of the body, and the continuity of movement which that twisting begets, reappear. The curves formed in the swimming of the fish are never less than two, a caudal and a cephalic one. They may and do exceed this number in the long-bodied fishes. The tail of the fish is made to vibrate pendulum fashion on either side of the spine, when it is lashed to and fro in the act of swimming. It is made to rotate upon one or more of the vertebræ of the spine, the vertebra or vertebræ forming the centre of a lemniscate, which is described by the caudal fin. There is, therefore, an obvious analogy between the tail of the fish and the extremity of the biped. This is proved by the conformation and swimming of the seal,--an animal in which the posterior extremities are modified to resemble the tail of the fish. In the swimming of the seal the hind legs are applied to the water by a sculling figure-of-8 motion, in the same manner as the tail of the fish. Similar remarks might be made with regard to the swimming of the whale, dugong, manatee, and porpoise, sea mammals, which still more closely resemble the fish in shape. The double curve into which the fish throws its body in swimming, and which gives continuity of motion, also supplies the requisite degree of steadiness. When the tail is lashed from side to side there is a tendency to produce a corresponding movement in the head, which is at once corrected by the complementary curve. Nor is this all; the cephalic curve, in conjunction with the water contained within it, forms the _point d’appui_ for the caudal curve, and _vice versa_. When a fish swims, the anterior and posterior portions of its body (supposing it to be a short-bodied fish) form curves, the convexities of which are directed on opposite sides of a given line, as is the case in the extremities of the biped when walking. The mass of the fish, like the mass of the biped, when once set in motion, contributes to progression by augmenting the rate of speed. The velocity acquired by certain fishes is very great. A shark can gambol around the bows of a ship in full sail; and a sword-fish (such is the momentum acquired by it) has been known to thrust its tusk through the copper sheathing of a vessel, a layer of felt, four inches of deal, and fourteen inches of oaken plank.[5]