Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/227

Rh "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, 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:

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