Change the spacing of tick marks on the axis of a plot?

I just discovered the Hmisc package:

Contains many functions useful for data analysis, high-level graphics, utility operations, functions for computing sample size and power, importing and annotating datasets, imputing missing values, advanced table making, variable clustering, character string manipulation, conversion of R objects to LaTeX and html code, and recoding variables.

library(Hmisc)    
plot(...)
minor.tick(nx=10, ny=10) # make minor tick marks (without labels) every 10th