We were at this stage, slumbering peacefully in our long-established convictions, when a man entered upon the scene and suddenly showed us that we were wrong and that, for long centuries, we had over looked a truth which was scarcely even covered with a very thin veil. And the strangest thing is that this astonishing discovery, is in no wise the natural consequence of a new invention, of processes or methods hitherto unknown. It owes nothing to the latest acquirements of our knowledge. It springs from the humblest idea which the most primitive man might have conceived in the first days of the earth's existence. It is simply a matter of having a little more patience, confidence and respect for all that which shares our lot in a world whereof we know none of the purposes. It is simply a matter of having a little less pride and of looking a little more fraternally upon existences that are much more fraternal than we believed. There is no secret about the almost puerile ingenuousness of Von Osten's methods and Krall's. They start with the principle that the horse is an ignorant but intelligent child; and they treat him as such. They speak, explain, demonstrate, argue and mete out rewards or punishments like a schoolmaster addressing little boys of five or six. They begin by placing a few skittle-pins in front of their strange pupil. They count them and make him count them by alternately lifting and lowering the horse's hoof. He thus obtains his first notion of numbers. They next add one or two more skittles and say, for instance:
"Three skittles and two skittles are five skittles."
In this way, they explain and teach addition; next, by the reverse process, subtraction, which is followed by multiplication, division and all the rest.
At the beginning, the lessons are extremely laborious and demand an untiring and loving patience, which is the whole secret of the miracle. But; as soon as the first barrier of darkness is passed, the progress becomes bewilderingly rapid.
All this is incontestable; and the facts are there, before which we must need bow. But what upsets all our convictions or, more correctly, all the prejudices which thousands of years have made as invincible as axioms, what we do not succeed in understanding is that the horse at once understands what we want of him; it is that first step, the first tremor of an unexpected intelligence, which suddenly reveals itself as human. At what precise second did the light appear and was the veil rent under? It is impossible to say; but it is certain that, at a given moment, without any visible sign to reveal the prodigious inner transformation, the horse acts and replies as though he suddenly understood the speech of man. What is it that sets the miracle working? We know that, after a time, the horse associates certain words with certain objects that interest him or with three or four events whose infinite repetition forms the humble tissue of his daily life. This is only a sort of mechanical memory which has nothing in common with the most elementary intelligence. But behold, one fine day, without any perceptible transition, he seems to know the meaning of a host of words which possess no interest for him; which represent to him no picture, no memory; which he has never had occasion to connect with any sensation, agreeable or disagreeable. He handles figures, which even to man are nothing but obscure and abstract ideas. He solves problems that cannot possibly be made objective or concrete. He reproduces letters which, from his point of view, correspond with nothing actual. He fixes his attention and makes observations on things or circumstances which in no way affect him, which remain and always will remain alien and indifferent to him. In a word, he steps out of the narrow ring in which he was made to turn by hunger and fear--which have been described as the two great moving powers of all that is not human--to enter the immense circle in which sensations go on being shed till ideas come into view.
Is it possible to believe that the horses really do what they appear to do? Is there no precedent for the marvel? Is there no transition between the Elberfeld stallions and the horses which we have known until this day? It is not easy to answer these questions, for it is only since yesterday that the intellectual powers of our defenseless brothers have been subjected to strictly scientific experiments. We have, it is true more than one collection of anecdotes in which the intelligence of animals is lauded to the skies; but we cannot rely upon these ill-authenticated stories. To find genuine and incontestable instances we must have recourse to the works, rare as yet, of scientific men who have made a special study of the subject. M.
Hachet-Souplet, for example, the director of the Institut de Psychologie Zoologique, mentions the case of a dog who learnt to acquire an abstract idea of weight. You put in front of him eight rounded and polished stones, all of exactly the same size and shape, but of different weights. You tell him to fetch the heaviest or the lightest; he judges their weight by lifting them and, without mistake, picks out the one required.
The same writer also tells the story of a parrot to whom he had taught the word "cupboard" by showing him a little box that could be hung up on the wall at different heights and in which his daily allowance of food was always ostentatiously put away;"I next taught him the names of a number of objects," says M.
Hachet-Souplet, "by holding them out to him. Among them was a ladder; and I prevailed upon the bird to say, 'Climb,' each time that he saw me mount the steps. One morning, when the parrot's cage was brought into the laboratory, the cupboard was hanging near the ceiling, while the little ladder was stowed away in a corner among other objects familiar to the bird. Now the parrot, every day, when I opened the cupboard, used to scream, 'Cupboard!
