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7iiohts, When I got to hot nights I shut the book and 

 have never looked at it since. Horses are mischievous, 

 they are fond of nibbling things, and often lift latches 

 and draw bolts, and nothing is more likely than that a 

 horse should draw the slide of a corn shoot if he could 

 reach it, or pull a cord which opened a window, and 

 he would be as likely to do it on a hot night as a cold 

 one ; but the deliberate suggestion of the chain of 

 reasoning which would induce him to do it because the 

 night was hot is outrageous, and under the circum- 

 stances quite unpardonable. Here we have first the 

 love of the marvellous, and secondly the introduction 

 of inference, and most unwarrantable inference at that, 

 instead of adhering to a plain statement of fact. In 

 contrast with this pretentious error it is refreshing to 

 note the real science conveyed in a remark by one who 

 made no claim to it. Whyte Melville put a sentence 

 into the mouth of a horse dealer "To avoid a falling 

 leaf a horse will jump over a precipice," which shows 

 how shrewd an observer the Major was, and exactly 

 conveys the kind of intellectual defect to which highly 

 bred horses are especially liable. An American horse 

 tamer, who was very clever at teaching horses tricks, 

 used to say " A horse has got two sides to his brain 

 and you must teach both sides or he will only be able 

 to do the trick on one." Which was a wrong ex- 

 planation, but a true statement of the fact, that a horse 

 has so little imagination that if he is taught a trick on 

 one side, he is unable to make the obvious correction 

 to apply it to the other, and the whole thing must be 

 gone through again. 



Error No. 3, viz. disregard of the proportion 

 which evidence should bear to probability is a very 



