REACTION OF THE HORSE 231 



calling, since he was thereby influencing the horse in the 

 choice of the cloth, he answered : " Why that's just what 

 I wish to do ! " — But though the statement that he was 

 aware of the nature of these grosser signs is thus seen 

 to be true, it by no means necessarily implies that he had 

 purposely trained the animal to respond to them. In 

 these observations of his he had builded better than he 

 knew — he evidently had no notion of their scientific sig- 

 nificance. But the same thing might happen to those 

 who were suppossed to be somewhat less naive, as is 

 shown by the experience of Mr. Schillings, who quite un- 

 consciously, for many months had been giving not only 

 the finer, but also the grosser signs, and never guessed 

 the true nature of affairs until I explained it to him. Nor 

 was it an easy matter for me to get at the facts involved 

 in the process, although it now all appears so very simple. 



On the other hand, it is also true that Mr. von Osten - 

 knew nothing whatever of the finer, more minute signals, 

 such as the final jerk, the head-movement upward, down- 

 ward, etc., and it is difficult to conceive how he might 

 have gained any knowledge of them. We might per- 

 haps conceive of four possible sources, i He might have/ 

 come upon them by chance. But it is extremely im- 

 probable that in the million of possible forms of sig- 

 naling he should have hit upon those that at the 

 same time represent the natural expressive movements. 

 '=^0r he might have derived a knowledge of them through 

 a study of the pertinent literature. I have searched 

 diligently for such a source, in both the old and the 

 modern literature, but in vain. From the sixteenth 

 century on, there is a series of accounts of horses that 

 were able to spell and to solve problems in arithmetic, 

 and the reports on learned dogs go back even to the time 



