176 THE HORSE OF MR. VON OSTEN 



respond to cues in the form of slight movements, which 

 remained unnoticed by the layman, and this fact has 

 been made use of by circus trainers to its fullest extent. 

 But such signs, I have discovered, are without excep- 

 tion, of a far coarser sort than thosgs^^we have here de- 

 scribed, and they can be instantly detected by the prac- 

 tised observer. Nor was it known to professional trainers 

 that it was possible for the master to direct a horse to 

 any point of the compass simply by means of the quiet 

 posture of the body. For this reason it was believed 

 that no signs could possibly be involved in the color- 

 selecting-tests (cf. Supplement IH, page 255). In this 

 we have the support of some of our experts, as is wit- 

 nessed by the following extract from a letter of his Ex- 

 cellency Count G. Lehndorff, one of our best hippological 

 authorities, who at one time carefully examined the Osten 

 horse. (The letter was addressed to Mr. Schillings, and 

 I have permission of both gentlemen to use it). In it he 

 says : " If the author's statements, in which you also have 

 concurred, are correct, and if, as a matter of fact, the 

 horse really does react to such minute movements as are 

 absolutely imperceptible to the human observer, then we 

 have indeed something quite new, for hitherto no one 

 would have believed that horses can perceive movements 

 which man cannot. But I am even more surprised by the 

 explanation of the color-selecting feats. — This too, is 

 something absolutely new. One would not have deemed 

 it possible that a horse could do anything of the kind 

 simply by Using the posture of a man's body as a cue to 

 which it could react with such precision." 



And yet, even though both facts were new concerning 

 the horse and had not hitherto been proven experiment- 

 ally regarding any other species, nevertheless something 



