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