This beautiful photo of Pericles appeared on Facebook yesterday, courtesy of PG Gregory.
So much has been said about the five lumbar vertebra of the Arabian horse. Many authors still mention it up till now. But History and science reject this assumption. This feature was described by Auguste Rochau, then by his pupil André Sanson. Both of them were French veterinarians in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is a summarized translation of what Sanson said on the topic : — The aryan horse, with a straight frontal bone and rectilinear nose bones and six lumbar vertebra is from Asia. — The mongolic horse, with a convex profile and nose bones and five lumbar vertebra is from Africa. Here under is the translated text of Sanson ( extract from Denis Bogros’s book) [Both brachycephalic, one has a flat frontal bone, rectilinear nose bones and six lumbar vertebra in the spinal column, with seven cervical , eighteen dorsal and five sacral. The other has a convex or rounded frontal bone, slightly curved nose bones, and only five lumbar vertebra, and seven cervical vertebra, eighteen dorsal, and five sacral; and this one’s lumbar vertebra are not only different from the others by their inferior number, but they differ also by their transverse apophyses’s shape…