74 Chapters on Animals. 



watchfulness of the dog, or the steady flame of the lion's 

 luminous orbs, but he can listen and obey, and his acts of 

 obedience pass easily by repetition into fixed habits, so that 

 you never have to teach him more than one thing at a time. 

 The way to educate a horse is to do as Franklin did in the 

 formation of his moral habits — that is, to aim at one per- 

 fection at once, and afterwards, when that has become easy 

 from practice, and formed itself into a habit, to try for 

 some other perfection. A good horse never forgets your 

 lessons. There are unteachable brutes which ought to be 

 handed over to rude masters and rough work, but every 

 horse of average intelligence and gentle temper may be 

 very highly educated indeed. Beyond this average degree 

 of teachableness there are exceptional cases — the horses 

 of genius ; for genius (an exceptional vigour and intensity of 

 the mental faculties with correspondingly large powers of 

 acquisition) exists amongst the lower animals in due degree 

 as it does in the human species. A few animals of this 

 remarkable degree of endowment are picked up by the 

 proprietors of circuses, and so become known to the public, 

 but the probability is that a much larger proportion remain 

 in the obscurity of ordinary equine life, and that their gifts 

 escape attention. 



Most of us have seen remarkable performances of trained 

 horses. The most remarkable that I ever saw were those 

 of that wonderful black gelding that Pablo Fanque used 

 to ride. There can be no doubt that he had pride and 

 delight in his own extraordinary intelligence and perfect 

 education, just as some great poet or painter may delight 

 in the richness of his gifts and the perfection of his work. 

 But the circus performance is not the ideal aim of equine 

 accomplishment. One would not care much to have a horse 



Franklin's moral habits, see his autobiography, Chapter V. 



