Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/146

142 of 'Jim Key' includes among its dozen numbers such items as these: 'Jim shows his proficiency in figuring, adding, multiplication, division and subtraction for any number below thirty.' 'He spells any ordinary name asked him.' 'He reads and writes.' 'Gives quotations from the Bible where the horse is mentioned, giving chapter and verse '; and in addition acts as a post-office clerk or handles a cash-register. When these problems are reduced to equine terms, they prove to be simple variations of a single theme. To aid the figuring, the numbers are placed in natural order on large frames, five in a row, and five rows; and the letters, in alphabetical order, are similarly displayed. The numbers to be added or subtracted are proposed by some one in the audience, and repeated by the showman. The horse then proceeds to the card bearing the number that indicates the result, takes that card between his teeth and gives it to his master. The same is done for words composed of letters, each letter being selected in turn.

This is absolutely the whole performance; and even when most generously interpreted bears a decidedly remote resemblance to what the posters describe. The interesting part of it all is that so many who witness this simple exhibition are quite ready to conclude that before 'Jim Key' chooses his card, he goes through those mental processes which each one of the audience performs when he works out the answer to the problem as announced. This assumption is not alone wholly uncalled for, but is actually preposterous. One of the elementary facts that students of mind, whether of human or of animal minds, clearly grasp, is that there are vastly different ways in this complex world of ours, of doing the same thing. The same result is reached by wholly different means. To neglect this distinction would be to conclude that because one man—or, if you like, a horse or a squirrel—avoids a certain mushroom on account of its unpleasant odor, and the botanist does so by recognizing it as a specimen of Amanita muscaria, that all have displayed the same kind of intelligence, have used the same reasoning, because in the end they reach the same result—the avoidance of the fungus. To the simple, but comprehensive statement that the horse gives not the slightest indication of going through any of these processes in order to select his card, it need only be added that he gives decided indication of going through a very different land of process. It is not at all necessary to know precisely what special sign the horse observes in guiding his selections, in order to determine (which is the important thing) that it is some kind of simple sign, an operation that falls within this general type. The type of 'Jim Key's' operation is simply that of learning to go first to a certain one of five rows, that is either the middle, or the top, or the bottom, or the one between middle and top, or the one between middle and bottom; and then in turn to select one of five cards arranged horizontally that offer a similar choice. Whether the cards bear numbers or letters or Chinese