Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/506

488 learned a whit sooner or more easily when I thus showed them to the animal.

An interesting supplement to these facts is found in the following answers to some questions which I sent to the trainer of one of the most remarkable trick-performing horses now exhibited on the stage. The counting tricks done by this horse had been quoted to me by a friend as impossible of explanation unless the horse could be educated by being put through the right number of movements in connection with the different signals.

Question 1.—If you wished to teach a horse to tap seven times with his hoof when you asked him "How many days are there in a week?" would you teach him by taking his leg and making him go through the motions?

Answer.—"No!"

Question 2.—Do you think you could teach, him that way, even if naturally you would take some other way?

Answer.—"I do not think I could."

Question 3.—How would you teach him?

Answer.—"You put figure 2 on the blackboard and touch him on the leg twice with a cane, and so on."

The counting tricks of trained horses seem to us marvelous because we are not acquainted with the simple but important fact that a horse instinctively raises his hoof when one pricks or taps his leg in a certain place. Just as once given, the cat's instinct to claw, squeeze, etc., you can readily get a cat to open doors by working latches or turning buttons, so, once given this simple reflex of raising the hoof, you can, by ingenuity and patience, get a horse to do almost any number of counting tricks.

Probably any one who still feels confident that animals reason will not be shaken by any further evidence. Still, it will pay any one who cares to make scientific his notions about animal consciousness to notice the results of two sets of experiments not yet mentioned. The first set was concerned with the way animals learn to perform a compound act. Boxes were arranged so that two or three different things had to be done before the door would fall open. For instance, in one case the cat or dog had to step on a platform, reach up between the bars over the top of the box and claw down a string running across them, and finally push its paw out beside the door to claw down a bar which held it.

The animal's instinctive impulses do often lead it to accidentally perform these several acts one after another, and repeated accidental successes do in some of these cases cause the acts to be done at last in fairly quick succession. But we see clearly that the acts are not thought about or done with anything like a rational