653 This significance is particularly remarkable in connection with the development of speed, for the metacarpal region is the seat of very important leverage in the propulsion of the body. In the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, there stand side by side the skeleton of an immense carthorse (celebrated for having drawn all the stones of the Bell Rock Lighthouse to the shore), and a beautiful skeleton of a racehorse, which (though the fact is disputed) there is good reason to believe is the actual skeleton of Eclipse. When I was a boy my grandfather used to point out to me that the cannon-bone of the little racer is not only relatively, but actually, longer than that of the great Clydesdale.
656 It was these very drawings of Dû¥rerãs that gave to Peter Camper his notion of the ãfacial angle.ã Camperãs method of comparison was the very same as ours, save that he only drew the axes, without filling in the network, of his coordinate system; he saw clearly the essential fact, that the skull varies as a whole, and that the ãfacial angleã is the index to a general deformation. ãThe great object was to shew that natural differences might be reduced to rules, of which the direction of the facial line forms the norma or canon; and that these directions and inclinations are always accompanied by correspondent form, size and position of the other parts of the cranium,ã etc.; from Dr T. Coganãs preface to Camperãs work On the Connexion between the Science of Anatomy and the Arts of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (1768?), quoted in Dr R. Hamiltonãs Memoir of Camper, in Lives of Eminent Naturalists (Nat. Libr.), Edin. 1840.
657 The co-ordinate system of Fig. 382 is somewhat different from that which I drew and published in my former paper. It is not unlikely that further inôÙvesôÙtiôÙgaôÙtion will further simplify the comparison, and shew it to involve a still more symmetrical system.