y all of the horse's
answers were correct; but when the answers were unknown to the
questioner, the horse's responses were, with only a few exceptions,
quite unsuccessful. Since the few exceptional cases must be regarded as
fortuitous, the conclusion is warranted that the horse was unable to
read numerals without assistance.

In order to discover whether the horse could read words such as "Hans"
or "Stall" or the names of colors, they were written upon placards and
hung up in a row before the horse in such a way that the questioner
could see the individual word but could not immediately recognize the
particular place that each one occupied in the series. The horse was
then asked: "Upon which placard is the word 'Hans'?", "On which is the
word 'Stall'?", etc. In order to make sure, he was required to repeat
each answer.

Then the experimenter would determine for himself the place of the word
in the series and would ask the question again. Fourteen such tests, in
which the procedure was with knowledge on the part of the questioner,
were interspersed with twelve in which the procedure was without such
knowledge. With the latter there were no correct responses, whereas in
the cases of procedure with knowledge 100% of the answers were correct.
Evidently the horse could not read words.

Three words were thereupon whispered in his ear, which he was asked to
spell in accordance with the method described on page 21. Since he had
to indicate first the row, and then the place in the row occupied by the
letter, it took two answers to indicate the position of each letter. I
acted as questioner. The ordering of the table of letters was unknown to
me, except the position of the letter "a", which naturally came first,
and the place of the letter "s", concerning whose position I had
purposely inquired. The words chosen for this experiment were "Arm",
"Rom" (Rome) and "Hans". The horse responded incorrectly in the case of
every letter which was unknown to the questioner. "A" and "s" alone were
given correctly. Thus in spelling the word "Rom" the horse responded
with the series 3, 4; 3, 4; 5, 4; 5, 4; i. e. "jjst", instead of the
correct series: 4, 6; 4, 2; 3, 7. I later selected three other words,
the spelling of which involved the tapping of thirty-two numbers on the
part of Hans, and whose position I had carefully ascertained beforehand.
When these were given to the horse to spell, he responded promptly
without a single error. Evide