REACTION OF THE HORSE 219 



each time someone would raise the horse's foot as many 

 times as the count demanded (see Supplement I). Then 

 Mr. von Osten would take his stand at the horse's side 

 and would command him, let us say, to tap 3. Hans 

 noting merely (from his master's position) that he was 

 expected to tap, would begin. The instructor, who had 

 bent forward in order to watch the horse tapping,* would 

 involuntarily straighten up again at the third tap, without 

 being conscious of it and quite unaware that he was thus 

 giving a signal. The horse would be startled, and some- ; 

 times he would immediately cease tapping and sometim^ 

 not. But it was only in the first case that he would re- 

 ceive a reward. Thus, unknown to the instructor, an 

 association became established between the sight of the 

 upward jerk of the instructor and the act of ceasing to 

 tap. To be sure, the animal would receive sundry visual"" 

 impressions from the wooden pins set up before him and 

 the auditory stimulations of the spoken number names, on 

 the basis of which, the concepts were to be formed in his 

 mind. But in this chaos of visual impressions (at times 

 there were two wooden pins, then three, then four, some- 

 times there were the pins, at others, the balls of the count- 

 ing-machine) — and in the babel of word-sounds — which 

 evidently meant nothing but noise to him — amidst all this 

 there was but one constant element: the final movement 

 of the instructor's body. The moment the horse reacted 

 to this, he would receive the tidbit at the hands of his 

 overjoyed master, and thus he became more and more ac- . 

 customed to attend to this jerk, even after it had grad- 



* This natural and close connection between the process of attention 

 and the movement toward the object attended to is clearly expressed in 

 our English and French terras, derived from the Latin " tendere ad — ," 

 to reach toward—. 



