had paid no particular attention to his incidental mention of the 34-ribbed Aryan horse.
"M. Pictrement'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 Sayana imply that 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 zoölogical 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. Pictrement 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 myself, 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 incompatible with the objection to mangling the horse's bones, which is strongly displayed elsewhere 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 the priest readily reaches the heart or the like.
"But, if every rib ends in a cartilage, there must be thirty-six cartilages, 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 post-mortem 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 zoölogical aspect of the question. Horses may undoubtedly vary not only in the number of their ribs, but in the number of their dorso-lumbar vertebræ. 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 Anatomie 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. Piétrement seems to
