ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY 145 



pertinent, though possibly unnecessary, to point out the inherent con- 

 tradiction between the operations that a successful reply is supposed 

 to involve and the absurdity of the failures or wrong answers that 

 occasionally occur. Thus, this most intelligent Berlin horse, who is 

 supposed to be acquainted with difficult mathematical relations, occa- 

 sionally makes mistakes. Now when a child makes a mistake, it is 

 in regard to some operation just beyond its capacity, while the simpler 

 additions and subtractions are readily accomplished. On the other 

 hand, Hans, immediately after giving an answer in square-root, fails 

 to count the buttons on an officer's coat, and insists, until repeatedly 

 corrected, that a man has three ears and not two; or again, after 

 making the minute distinctions of German orthography, puts K for 

 J; and further, if this miraculous horse really distinguished the 

 sounds and converted them into letters, why should he not be phonetic- 

 ally misled and occasionally substitute, let us say, a ck for a 1-, which 

 would mean all the difference between 2 pawings followed by 1, and 

 3 followed by 0. Yet such objections are indeed superfluous, or would 

 be were they not so commonly disregarded by the prejudice in favor of 

 taking such absurd pretences at their face value. In brief, it is diffi- 

 cult seriously to investigate these limitations in any other spirit than 

 that of pointing out how unmistakably they indicate an unreasoning, 

 unrelated method of reaching the answer through some system of signs. 



This statement of the facts of the case does not at all imply that 

 in this performance we have reached the limits of the horse's education. 

 Very likely the intelligent horse may be taught to go very much farther 

 than this in the direction of his natural ability to associate signs with 

 actions. It would, for example, be very interesting to know whether 

 ' Jim Key ' could be taught, in selecting one after the other the letters 

 that spell his name, to go of his own accord for the ' I ' after he has 

 been led to the ' J/ and then to the ' M/ and so on ; that is, whether 

 he could learn to perform a series of selections by associating each with 

 the one following. This would still be a task of the same order, but a 

 more complicated one; and in investigations of this kind earnest stu- 

 dents of animal intelligence have obtained important evidence as to the 

 capacities and limitations of animal thinking. Such psychological 

 questions are asked in a different temper from that which prompts the 

 stage performances, and lead to far more useful results. 



And so we come last to the other side of our inquiry, why this kind 

 of a performance is so generally accepted at its face value, why educated 

 persons will attribute to the horse (as they do to the Berlin horse), the 

 insight to recognize that 27 divided by 7 gives 3 with a remainder of 

 six, that !/4 must be added to make a unit out of %, or that at 12 :17 

 one must wait 43 minutes for one o'clock ! Indeed, so wide-spread were 

 the misleading accounts of this learned animal, that a commission of 



VOL. LXIX. — 10. 



