488 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



learned a whit sooner or more easily when I thus showed them to 

 the animal. 



An interesting supplement to these facts is found in the follow- 

 ing answers to some questions which I sent to the trainer of one of 

 the most remarkable trick-performing horses now exhibited on the 

 stage. The counting tricks done by this horse had been quoted to 

 me by a friend as impossible of explanation unless the horse could 

 be educated by being put through the right number of movements 

 in connection with the different signals. 



Question 1. — If you wished to teach a horse to tap seven times 

 with his hoof when you asked him " How many days are there in a 

 week? " would you teach him by taking his leg and making him go 

 through the motions? 



Answer. — "ISTo! " 



Question 2. — Do you think you could teach, him that way, even 

 if naturally you would take some other way? 



Answer. — " I do not think I could." 



Question S. — How would you teach him? 



Answer. — " You put figure 2 on the blackboard and touch Mm 

 on the leg twice with a cane, and so on." 



The counting tricks of trained horses seem to us marvelous be- 

 cause we are not acquainted with the simple but important fact that 

 a horse instinctively raises his hoof when one pricks or taps his leg 

 in a certain place. Just as once given, the cat's instinct to claw, 

 squeeze, etc., you can readily get a cat to open doors by working 

 latches or turning buttons, so, once given this simple reflex of rais- 

 ing the hoof, you can, by ingenuity and patience, get a horse to do 

 almost any number of counting tricks. 



Probably any one who still feels confident that animals reason 

 will not be shaken by any further evidence. Still, it will pay any one 

 who cares to make scientific his notions about animal consciousness 

 to notice the results of two sets of experiments not yet mentioned. 

 The first set was concerned with the way animals learn to perform 

 a compound act. Boxes were arranged so that two or three differ- 

 ent things had to be done before the door would fall open. For in- 

 stance, in one case the cat or dog had to step on a platform, reach 

 up between the bars over the top of the box and claw down a string 

 running across them, and finally push its paw out beside the door to 

 claw down a bar which held it. 



The animal's instinctive impulses do often lead it to accidentally 

 perform these several acts one after another, and repeated acciden- 

 tal successes do in some of these cases cause the acts to be done at 

 last in fairly quick succession. But we see clearly that the acts are 

 not thought about or done with anything like a rational compre- 



