36 THE HORSE OF MR. VON OSTEN 



up in a row before the horse in such a way that the 

 questioner could see the individual word but could not 

 immediately recognize the particular place that each one 

 occupied in the series. The horse was then asked: 

 " Upon which placard is the word ' Hans ' ?, " On which 

 is the word ' Stall ' ? ", etc. In order to make sure, he 

 was required to repeat each answer. 



Then the experimenter would determine for himself 

 the place of the word in the series and would ask the 

 question again. Fourteen such tests, in which the pro- 

 cedure was with knowledge on the part of the ques- 

 tioner, were interspersed with twelve in which the pro- 

 cedure was without such knowledge. With the latter 

 there were no correct responses, whereas in the cases of 

 procedure with knowledge ioo% of the answers were 

 correct. Evidently the horse could not read words. 



Three words were thereupon whispered in his ear, 

 which he was asked to spell in accordance with the method 

 described on page 21. Since he had to indicate first the 

 row, and then the place in the row occupied by the letter, 

 it took two answers to indicate the position of each letter. 

 I acted as questioner. The ordering of the table of let- 

 ters was unknown to me, except the position of the letter 

 " a ", which naturally came first, and the place of the 

 letter " s ", concerning whose position I had purposely 

 inquired. The words chosen for this experiment were 

 " Arm ", " Rom " (Rome) and " Hans ". The horse re- 

 sponded incorrectly in the case of every letter which was 

 unknown to the questioner. " A " and " s " alone were 

 given correctly. Thus in spelling the word " Rom " the 

 horse responded with the series 3, 4 ; 3. 4 ; 5, 4 ; 5, 4 ; i. e. 

 " j jst ", instead of the correct series : 4, 6 ; 4, 2 ; 3, 7. I 

 later selected three other words, the spelling of which in- 



