proportion than the digits of the hand, and are less moveable, the want
of mobility being most striking in the great toe--which, again, is very
much larger in proportion to the other toes than the thumb to the
fingers. In considering this point, however, it must not be forgotten
that the civilized great toe, confined and cramped from childhood
upwards, is seen to a great disadvantage, and that in uncivilized and
barefooted people it retains a great amount of mobility, and even some
sort of opposability. The Chinese boatmen are said to be able to pull
an oar; the artisans of Bengal to weave, and the Carajas to steal
fishhooks, by its help; though, after all, it must be recollected that
the structure of its joints and the arrangement of its bones,
necessarily render its prehensile action far less perfect than that of
the thumb.

But to gain a precise conception of the resemblances and differences of
the hand and foot, and of the distinctive characters of each, we must
look below the skin, and compare the bony framework and its motor
apparatus in each (Fig. 18).

FIG. 18-.-The skeleton of the Hand and Foot of Man reduced from Dr.
Carter's drawings in Gray's 'Anatomy.' The hand is drawn to a larger
scale than the foot. The line 'a a' in the hand indicates the boundary
between the carpus and the metacarpus; 'b b' that between the latter
and the proximal phalanges; 'c c' marks the ends of the distal
phalanges. The line "a' a'" in the foot indicates the boundary between
the tarsus and metatarsus; "b' b'" marks that between the metatarsus
and the proximal phalanges; and "c' c'" bounds the ends of the distal
phalanges; 'ca', the calcaneum; 'as', the astragalus; 'sc', the
scaphoid bone in the tarsus.