Why Have We Five Fingers on Each Hand and Five Toes on Each Foot?
All animals, it seems, from a study of nature were started with ten fingers and ten toes, the fingers originally having been the toes of the fore legs. In a good many cases the environment in which animals have lived has caused a change in the formation of the ends of the limbs as well as in the limbs themselves. The horse, for instance, has developed into a one toe or one finger animal, while a cow is a two finger animal. The hen has only three toes on each foot and a part of another. But if we go back into the history and examine how the horses’ foot used to look we will find that he originally had five toes. The same is true of the cow and also the hen. Something happened to cause the change, for the rule of five fingers and five toes on the end of each limb has been universal. If you examine a chicken in a shell just before it is ready to come out, you can distinctly count five toes on each foot and at the ends of the wings you will see five little points, which under other conditions would develop into fingers, perhaps. Some of these toes of the new-born chicken do not develop. It can be accepted as a rule that creatures were intended in the original plan to have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot, making our count of tens, which is the world’s basis for counting, and has always been.