246 THE HORSE OF MR. VON OSTEN 



the horse was hke that with a child at school, — ^he made 

 much use of the apparatus and never did they notice any- 

 thing Hke an habituation to respond to certain signals; 

 and finally the appearance of the apparatus itself— some 

 of which could not be bought at second hand — was most 

 convincing. 



The apparatus used for the work in arithmetic consisted 

 mainly of a set of large wooden pins, a set of smaller 

 ones (such as are to be had in toy-shops), a counting- 

 machine, such as is commonly used in the schools, a chart 

 upon which were pasted the numbers from i to loo, and 

 finally the digits, cut large and in brass and suspended 

 from a string. For the work in reading Mr. von Osten 

 used the chart shown in the frontispiece of this book. 

 Here we have the letters of the alphabet in small German 

 script with numbers written below which serve to indi- 

 cate the row, and what place in that row, the letters 

 occupy. For tones, a small, child's organ was used with 

 the diatonic scale C^ to C^, and for instruction in colors, 

 a number of colored cloths were used. 



The work in arithmetic began by placing a single 

 wooden pin in front of Hans and then commanding him : 

 " Raise the foot ! — One ! " Here we must assume that 

 the horse had learned to respond to the command to raise 

 the foot during the preceding period, when tapping in 

 general had been taught. In order to get the horse to 

 learn that he was to give only one tap, Mr. von Osten 

 tried to control the tapping by means of holding the ani- 

 mal's foot, just as a" teacher tries to aid a pupil in learning 

 to write by guiding his hand. He repeated this exercise 

 so often that finally the single tap was made. And al- 

 ways the right foot was insisted upon. Bread and carrots 

 were the constant rewards. 



