A CURIOUS QUESTION OF HORSES' RIBS. 217 



had paid no particular attention to his incidental mention of the 34-ribbed Aryan 

 horse. 



"M. Pietrement's essay raises three questions. The first, Does the passage 

 of Dirghatamas's hymn cited necessarily imply that the horse known to him had 

 only thirty-four ribs ? The second, Does the passage from Saya^za imply tliat 

 he asserted of his own knowledge that the horses of his time (in 1400 a. d.) had 

 only thirty-four ribs? The third, Are there any zoological arguments in favor 

 of or against the existence of a breed of 34-ribbed horses ? 



" 1. Your Latin version of the solitary Vedic passage upon which M. Pietre- 

 ment relies, admits the reading, ' The axe cuts through [the] thirty-four ribs of 

 the quick horse,' etc. 



" I speak ignorantly, but suppose I am right in assuming that there is no 

 more 'the' in the Sanskrit than in the Latin. Nevertheless, it is upon the 

 presence of this definite article that the question turns. For, without it, the 

 passage may simply mean that the axe cuts through thirty-four ribs out of 

 the thirty-six with which the horse is provided. What makes me think that 

 this may be the proper signification of the passage is the inquiry I put to my- 

 self, For what purpose did the sacrificing priest want to cut through the horse's 

 ribs ? Surely, in order to disembowel him. But, in order to do this, no one 

 would go through the great trouble and labor of chopping through the bony 

 parts of the ribs of a horse. Moreover, such a proceeding would be incom- 

 patible with the objection to mangling the horse's bones, which is strongly dis- 

 played elsew^here in the Vedic hymn. 



" But every bony rib ends below in a gristly substance, and it is quite easy 

 to cut these ' costal cartilages,' and then, turning them back, along with the 

 breastbone, the cavity of the chest is laid widely open, and tlie priest readily 

 reaches the heart or tlie like. 



"But, if every rib ends in a cartilage, there must be thirty-six cartUages, and 

 not thirty-four ? 



" True, but the last pair of ribs is much shorter than the others. It is not 

 needful that all the thirty-six pairs of costal cartilages should be cut through in 

 order to lay the chest thoroughly open ; and for sacrificial purposes it may have 

 been inconvenient to cut through more than the thirty-four ribs which lie in 

 front of it. 



" If you are laying open a man's chest for a 2^ost-7noTtem examination, you go 

 to work exactly as I am supposing the Aryan priest to do. You cut through the 

 rib cartilages on each side and take them away, along with the breast-bone to 

 which they are attached. But, in doing this, you leave at least the last two 

 ribs on each side untouched, because they are free, so that it is not needful to 

 cut them. 



" If I were a poet, and made a hymn about a post-mortem examination, I 

 might speak of the operator's scalpel 'cutting through the twenty ribs,' without 

 meaning to imply that the man of the period is devoid of his full complement. 



" 2. Does Sayana say that the horses of his time had only thirty-four ribs ? 

 The passage quoted by you does not seem to me to bear that interpretation 

 at all. 



" 3. As to the zoological aspect of the question. Horses may undoubtedly 

 vary not only in the number of their ribs, but in the number of their dorso-lum- 

 bar vertebrfB. The latter may be twenty-four (as usual), or twenty-three, as in 

 the cases cited by Sanson, and also by Legh in his ' Handbuch der Anatomic der 

 Hausthiere ; ' and the former may be eighteen (as usual) or nineteen on each 

 side. Unfortunately, I know of no case on record (and M. Pietrement seems to 



