2i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have been unable to find one) in wliich either horse, ass, or other equine animal, 

 had feicer than thirty-eight ribs. If a 34-ribbed race of horses ever existed, I 

 think it ought to turn up as a variety now and then. But it does not ; and, what 

 is still more to the purpose, we do not find that any of the immediate allies of 

 the horse have fewer than thirty-six ribs ; though they may, as in the case of 

 the ass, have only five lumbar vertebra;. 



" Without wishing, in the least, to dogmatize, then, I must say that the 

 zoological probabilities appear to me to be dead against M. Pietrement's hypoth- 

 esis; and unless you tell me that the Sanskrit text must mean that Dirghata- 

 mas's horses had thirty-four ribs and no more, I shall take leave to doubt the 

 existence of these 34- ribbed steeds. 



" I am afraid I have troubled you with a very long letter, which does not 

 come to much in the way of certainty after all. . . . 



" I remain, yours very truly, T. H. Huxley." 



I have little doiibt that Prof. Huxley has solved the riddle. It is 

 open to translate either the thirty-four, or thirty-four ribs ; hut, whether 

 we adopt the one or the other rendering, it seems clear that the poet 

 must have had some reason for mentioning that number. If thirty- 

 four was the usual number of a horse's ribs in his time, then there 

 seems little reason for giving the number. " Cut the ribs " would 

 have conveyed the same meaning as " cut the thirty-four ribs." If, 

 on the contrary, the number thirty-four was mentioned because it was 

 exceptional, then the poet, and his commentators too, would have said 

 more about the anomaly. Every thing becomes intelligible if we ad- 

 mit that, in cutting open the horse, two ribs were not to be cut, so 

 that they might remain and keep the carcass together. In that case 

 to mention the number of ribs that were to be cut had a purpose, 

 though it is strange that tradition, which in India possesses such ex- 

 traordinary tenacity in unimportant matters, should not have pre- 

 served the original purj)ort of the words of Dirghatamas. I have 

 looked in vain for a passage where the cutting of the thirty-four ribs 

 in the horse-sacrifice is more fully described ; but I ought to add that 

 in the oldest descriptions of the sacrifice of other animals, preserved in 

 the Aitareya-Brahma??a and the >S'rauta-Sutras of Alvarayana, nothing 

 it said of leaving tAVO ribs undivided. " Twenty-six are his ribs," we 

 read: " lefhim take them out in order; let him not spoil any limb." 

 Academy. 



GEOGRAPHICAL WOP.K OF 18Y4. 



AT the meeting of the American Geographical Society, lield Feb- 

 ruary 25, 1875, the annual address was delivered by Chief-Jus- 

 tice Daly, the President of the Society. Beginning with a brief survey 

 of the remarkable physical phenomena of the year, including great 

 falls of rain and snow, extreme and widely-distributed cold, earth- 



