THE 'THINKING HORSES.'

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1835, 22 August 1913, Page 5

THE 'THINKING HORSES.'

REPORT OF INVESTIGATORS. DIFFICULT PROBLEMS. At a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research, held on Thursday, July 3, in London, a most interesting report on the "thinking horses" of Eiberfeld was made by two gentlemen specially deputed by the society to inquire into tne real or supposed powers of these animals. The investigation was made by Mr. Edward Bullough, Fellow of Cionville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Mr. V. J. Woolley, M.D., who visited Eiberfeld last Starch for this - purpose. These horses have aroused in the last year or two a great de.il of curiosity in Germany, France, and Italy. The polemics caused by them have occasionally reached an extraordinary degree of heat, and acrimony, and tho controversy is. far from being at an end. The investigation 'by Messrs. Bullough and AVoolley, althouh made at a season not very favourable for the inquiry, was sufficiently suggestive in its results to stimulate ttiem to further observation, which thev hope to undertake in September. Mr. Bulloug;h, in his communication explained how in 1890 a certain Herr you Osten, retired mathematical schoolmaster, living in Berlin, ohserved that, a horse which he used to ride and drive responded apparently intelligently to demands. He took up the idea of perfecting this rudimentary education. Alter a short period of training he succeeded' in obtaining perfect responses to orders such r "®top,"' "Turn to the left or right," ' i\ alk," "Trot," etc., and was able to drive his horse without touching the reins, by vocal directions alone, along even the crowded thoroughfares of Berlin. The success of this teaching suggested to him the idea of putting the horse through a regular course of instruction, when tho horse died. Mr. Bullough proceeded to give details-of an attemnt'by von Osten to. educate a Russian stallion. This horse achieved remarkable proficiency in arithmetic, spelling, aud so forth. In 1905 von Osten came into contact with Mr. K. Krall, of Eiberfeld. Mr. Krall became interested, and in 1908 he bought two Arab stallions and began instruction on the lines of von Osten. The horses received a systematic course of instruction, exactly of the character of elementary school teaching. Spatial relations, counting, addition and subtraction, the multiplication tablo up to 12 times 12, and division, date reckoning, squaring and the extraction of roots, reading, and spelling were successively explained and demonstrated. The progress of the horses was rapid beyond expectation. AVhei* tho horses had made such-progress in arithmetic, reading, and spelling as to suggest that they had become fairly familiar with languages. Mr. Krall instituted objeclessons at which pictures, portraits, aud other subjects were displayed, discussed, and explained.. The first step in the training was to tame the animal—i.e., to make him familiar with his master, and, above all, to captivate his attention by caresses, carrots, and other signs of affection. The second and far more difficult stago was to teach the animal to control his movements so as to adapt them to responsive expressions, or rather to render the animal conscious of them. This appears to bo a step which some of tlio animals find great difficulty in taking. Another of the horses, Ainasis, who has been taught for about six mouthy seems to be constitutionally unable to acquire any such control. He stamped extremely well, and appeared very attentive, but could not get hiniseu to stop at tho right number, counting six or seven instead of five, eight or nine instead of seven, unless Mr. Krall counted aloud with him. Assuming that the horses had J a conception of number, as the investigators were inclined to think after 'Ohio rather striking performances they witnessed, it was developed during this stage of their education, in the form of movement-images. Mr. Krall explained to his horses all tho rudimentary procedure of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division as lie would to a child, and was greatly astonished at tho ease and quickness of their understanding—for instance, in grasping tho difference between 3 x 2 and 3 squared. But he purposely did not go beyond the explanation of simplo problems. He intentionally left the horses to themselves to see what they would make of moro complex ones. Ho himself did not know by what methods tho horses extracted roots beyond the square root of I<l4, tho highest square which ho taught them.

The same might. l>o said of the spelling. With the aid bf a Simplified spellingtable the 1 horses learnt to spell, each letter being represented by a number The association between' each letter and a certain number being once formed the spelling of words written' on the blackboard was merely a matter of memory. Something far ■ more rem plicated and far " more inteiv.iting, but at present inexplicable, was aohieved when- the horses began to spell out spontaneous statements. After many attempts to teach the horses the complicated German orthography,. Mr. Krall finally left them to their own devices, which produced a very'crratic but sometimes ingeniously phonetic-spelling. Thus they spolt "essen to; eat, "sji," anil "gehen," to go, "gn." . It was'this fact which led llr. Krall to thiiilr. that ■ Mnhammed and Zarif- belonged to the "auditive" type. Encouraged by his success with these horses, Mr. Krall attempted . t.ho education of others, besides an Algerian donkey. The latter proved intelligent enough, but so obstinate that his education had to be abandoned. With the other horses lie had similar though varying, experiences.

Dr. Woolley, in his rauort. said that the possibilities they had to consider when. they, set out to investigate tho capacity of the horses to.tc roughly fourfa) the horses might really possess the intellectual abilities ascribed to them by their owner; (b) they might-by this time have learned by heart the answers to all tho problems which t-liey could present to them; (c) they might respond to signals given consciously or unconsciously by some person present; (d) tliev mitrht respond to some, supernormal' influence exerted by s-ome such ne.rson. Thev very much regretted that they were not in i rewition to give any definite solution of the problem. All they could do was 'o give some account of their experiments and t« point out the diiffienl-fres in tho way of accepting any one of these liyp:theses.