EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS 79 



his mouth and carried it to the questioner. If the cloth, 

 like the placards, hung from the cord, he approached, 

 pointed it out with his nose and then backed up to his 

 original position. Before approaching the objects, Hans 

 was required to indicate, by tapping, the number of the 

 place in the series (counting from left to right), which 

 the cloth or placard occupied. Mr. von Osten never 

 omitted this requirement. Then the command " Go ! " 

 was given, and Hans obeyed. (As a matter of fact, a 

 slight directive movement of the head or hand was just 

 as effective as the spoken command). 



The following cases, chosen in a haphazard fashion, 

 show that the horse's indication of the object's place in 

 the series, by means of tapping, was by no means a 

 guarantee that he would point it out correctly. Five 

 placards hung from the cord. Mr. von Osten asked: 

 " What is the position, counting from left to right, of the 

 placard which has the word ' aber ' inscribed upon it ? ". 

 Hans answered : 3. (It was indeed the middle placard.) 

 Then he was commanded : " Go ! ". Thereupon Hans 

 went straight to the fourth placard. On another occa- 

 sion Hans happened to drop a brown cloth upon a black 

 one. His master asked him : " In which place are there 

 two cloths ? ". Hans responded correctly, " In the second 

 place ". To the question " Which of the two "s the black 

 one ? " he also answered rightly : " The lower one ". 

 Upon being asked to get it, he brought the white cloth. 



The large number and the irregularities of the errors 

 showed that there was no manner of intelligence involved 

 in the pointing out process. Thus during the two months 

 of our experimentation Hans was asked twenty-five times 

 by Mr. von Osten to bring the green cloth. Only six 

 times did he succeed in the first attempt, while in five 



