< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu
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A CURIOUS QUESTION OF HORSES' RIBS.

"for," said he, "in ancient times the robust chests of heroes might very well have 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 animal, 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. Pictrement, who, in his work "Les Origines du Cheval domestique d'après la Paléontologie, la Zoologie, l'Histoire et la Philologie" (Paris, 1870), first called attention to this curious statement, and drew from it the conclusion, supported by some very ingenious 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 zoölogists, and more particularly M. Sanson, raised some strong objections, but M. Pictrement replied to them in his "Mémoire sur les Chevaux à trente-quatre côtes des Aryas de l'Époque Védique" (Paris, 1871), and the question is still sub judice.

M. Pictrement'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, Chauveau remarks as follows on the number of ribs in the horse: ‘We reckon for each lateral half of the thorax eighteen ribs. Not unfrequently we find nineteen, with an equal number of dorsal vertebræ in well-formed horses; but, then, most usually there are only five lumbar vertebræ.’
"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 caballus), the number of the other vertebræ 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 vertebræ; and the crossing of these horses with horses having six lumbar vertebræ 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. Pictrement appealed for its reality to a passage in the most ancient literary document of the whole Aryan world, the "Rig-Veda."

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

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