i6o THE HORSE OF MR. VON OSTEN 



Hans's seeming knowledge of the value of coins and 

 cards, of the calendar and the time of day, as well as his 

 ability to recognize persons or their photographs, can 

 now be readily understood. In all of these cases, we had 

 to deal, in so far as knowledge is concerned, only with 

 that of the questioner, — the horse simply tapped the 

 number the questioner had in mind. The meaning which 

 was supposed to be expressed by the tapping never 

 existed as far as Hans was concerned ; it was only in the 

 mind of the questioner that the concepts: ace, gold, 

 Sunday, January, were associated with " i ", etc. The 

 same was true with regard to all other wonderful feats 

 of memory. The sentence : " Briicke und Weg sind vom 



a peasant to dig a pit eleven feet deep, then he sends him away so that 

 no other should get into the secret. He himself digs a foot deeper, but 

 all in vain, for he finds nothing. Standing in the pit, he again takes up 

 the branch. Again it moves, but this time it points upward, as if to 

 indicate that the treasure had disappeared from the earth. Dismayed, 

 he climbs out of the pit and questions the branch a third time. This 

 time it points downward once more. He climbs back into the pit. 

 Presently he feels the prick of conscience (for in the 17th century many 

 regarded the dipping of the divining rod as the work of the Devil). 

 Terrified, he exclaims : " O God, if the thing I am doing here is wrong, 

 then I renounce the Evil One and his rod (s'il y adu mal, je renonceau 

 demon et k la baguette "). Having spoken, he once more takes the rod 

 in hand to test it. It does not move. Horrified, for now there was no 

 longer any doubt that Satan was the cause of its movements, the man 

 makes the sign of the cross and runs away. But he had hardly gone 

 more than two or three hundred paces when the thought strikes him : 

 Is it really true that the branch will no longer move for him .' He 

 throws a coin to the ground, cuts a branch from a bush nearby, and is 

 overjoyed when he notes how it dips down toward the money. 



Another example is to be found in a report of the well-known physi- 

 cist, Ritter ", of Munich, which appeared during the early part of 

 the 19th century. Ritter, a man with a bent for natural philosophy and 

 metaphysics, describes an instrument which was to replace the divining 

 rod, and which he called " balancier." It was simple enough, consisting 



