A CURIOUS QUESTIOjSF OF HORSES' RIBS. 215 



" for," said he, " in aBcient times the robust chests of heroes misrht 

 very well liave had more bones than our degenerate day can boast." 

 In this he was wrong. 



I take these statements from Mr. Lewes's " Life of Goethe " (p. 343), 

 and I have to confess that I have not verified them. They interested 

 me, however, as bearing on a controversy that has been carried on for 

 some time between scholars and anatomists, viz., whether another ani- 

 mal, the horse, instead of losing, has developed in course of time some 

 bones which it did not originally possess. Horses have now thirty- 

 six ribs ; sometimes, it is said, thirty-eight. But there is a passage in 

 the " Rig- Veda," which speaks apparently of only thirty-four ribs in 

 horses. It was M. Pietrement, who, in his work " Les Origines du 

 Cheval domestique d'apres la Paleontologie, la Zoologie, I'Histoire et 

 la Philologie" (Paris, 1870), first called attention to this curious state- 

 ment, and drew from it the conclusion, supported by some very in- 

 genious arguments, that at" the time of the Vedic poets, say about 

 1500 B. c, there existed a race of horses with only thirty-four ribs. 

 Other zoologists, and more -partici^larly M. Sanson, raised some strong 

 objections, but M. Pietrement replied to them in his "Memoire sur les 

 Chevaux a trente-quatre c6tes des Aryas de I'Epoque Vedique " (Paris, 

 1871), and the question is still siibjudice. 



M. Pietrement's reasoning may best be given in his own words : 



" In the first place, I would observe that the presence of only thirty-four 

 ribs in an equine race, whether ancient or modern, would not be by any means 

 abnormal, or contrary to the laws of Nature ; for it is fully agreed now that the 

 number of these bones is far from being constant in our present horses. Indeed, 

 Cbauveau remarks as follows on the number of ribs in the horse : ' "We reckon 

 for each lateral half of the thorax eighteen ribs. Not unfrequently Ave find nine- 

 teen, with an equal number of dorsal vertebrae in well-formed horses ; but, then, 

 most usually there are only five lumbar vertebrae. ' 



" On the other hand, we sometimes find in horses of a certain type ' only five 

 lumbar vertebra, instead of six (which is the usual number in the species Equus 

 calalliis), the number of the other vertebrte being the same as usual in the horse.' 



" When this latter fact was published in France by M. Sanson, it at first met 

 with much opposition, but now it is fully accepted by men of science ; and it is 

 justly considered as an indication of the ancient existence of an equine race with 

 five lumbar vertebrfe ; and the crossing of these horses with horses having six 

 lumbar vertebrje fully accounts for the frequent anomalies of conformation which 

 we find in this region of the vertebral column." 



Having by these considerations established the possibility of an 

 ancient race of horses with only thirty-four ribs, M. Pietrement ap- 

 pealed for its reality to a passage in the most ancient literary docu- 

 ment of the whole Aryan world, the " Rig-Veda." 



The passage in which the thirty-four ribs of the horse are men- 

 tioned occurs in the 162d hymn of the first book of the " Rig- Veda 

 Samhita." I translated the whole of that hymn in my " History of 

 Ancient Sanskrit Literature" (1860, p. 553). The hymn is ascribed to 



