EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS 41 



therefore arose : does the horse get these stimuli while 

 the question is being put, or during his responses, i. e., 

 during the process of tapping. 



If Mr. von Osten's opinion was correct, then the 

 process of questioning played an important part in the 

 success of the experiment. Of course, as he said, it was 

 not necessary to ask the question aloud ; it was suiiScient 

 — curiously enough — that it be inwardly spoken, thanks 

 to the horse's extraordinary auditory sensitivity. If, how- 

 ever, conditions were made such that the auditory sense 

 was eliminated, then the animal would be unable to re- 

 spond. Such a theory is not quite as absurd as it might 

 seem at first blush. For Hansen and Lehmann have shown 

 that an acute auditory organ is able to respond to such 

 delicate stimulation as is involved in the softest whisper, 

 or even in the so-called nasal whisper in which the lips 

 are tightly closed.^ They have attempted thus to ex- 

 plain any modes of supposed " thought-transference ", 

 (cf. page 7). Since experts on horses agree that the 

 horse has acute auditory sensitivity, Mr. von Osten 

 seized upon this fact and tried to establish his theory in 

 the following manner. No response was successfully 

 made on the part of the horse, he said, when the sound 

 waves caused by his (Mr. von Osten's) inner speech were 

 deflected from the ear of the horse. This was the case 

 when he closed nose and motith while inwardly putting 

 the question, or deflected the waves from the horse's ear 

 by means of a placard held before his mouth while speak- 

 ing, or finally by applying lined ear-muffs to the horse's 

 ears. If, on the other hand, he closed only his nose and 

 not his mouth while thus inwardly putting the question, 

 or if he held the placard so that there was a possibility of 

 deflecting the sounds to the horse's ear, or if the ear- 



