HANS OF THE " ELBERFELDERS " : A VISIT TO
HANS RECALLED.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SEF,CTATuk...]
SIR,—I was very much interested to read in a letter to the-- Spectator that my friend Hans—" der kluge Hans," of Herr. von Osten—is still exercising his talents, and evidently posing, as a living example of strenuous endeavour to the Elberfeld.. horses, whose path in life seems less thorny. When I first met Hans in Berlin some years ago it was under semi-private. conditions. His old master had been wounded to the quick at the doubts cast upon his intelligent pupil. Quietly and' unobtrusively did both tackle the task of "daily lessons,"- going through those feats in "elementary education" which first made Hans a celebrity, although six months later people were ready to overwhelm all concerned with ridicule and humiliation. "School hours" were still attended by a few old. friends and animal-lovers in the yard adjoining Hans's stable. He was thetka tall five-year-old, with a skin like black satin and a big white star on his forehead, and between his "turns" he was walked up and down his "class-room," an exercise he. being of a distinctly Skittish temperament, would embellish by sundry"
terpsichorean efforts not in the programme. He wore a little cap, tight-fit ting over his ears, and had an improvised blinker shielding the eye nearest to his master, adopted in order to refute the report that the horse could either see or hear any covert sign or whispered direction.
I understand the Elberfeld horses are trained on the same system as Hans, whose schoolroom requisites included, first
and foremost, a big blackboard chalked out with all the letters of the alphabet, as well as with the " combined " sounds used in German spelling (though Hans, by the way,
is a Russian). These filled the various lines and were inter-
spersed with numerals. Now, when Hans wished to spell a word he first indicated the line and then the letter by little stamps of his right hoof, the last being a sort of final flourish
quite his own idea, as much as to say "There, now !" To questions asked he actually spelt the answer, incredible as it may seem. One such was put by a lady who had only seen him for the first time the week before. Hans had on that occasion manifested a curious interest in the feathers adorning her hat; be had even ventured a little nibble, to which act of familiarity his visitor had playfully said, " Nein, Hans ! besehen, aber nicht anriihren ! " Suddenly remembering the incident, she went up to him and said, "Hans, listen to me : what did I say to you last week ? " (touching the feathers); then be "stamped off" his spelling of the sentence (which we were of course able to check by the blackboard) from memory, for none of us had heard it before the spelling, and no whisper could have passed undetected, for we were all grouped close at hand. The next feat I witnessed I also put on record without attempting to account for it, and would only remark that Herr von Osten was at a distant part of the yard. Well, several of us wrote down numbers, sometimes by arrangement together, sometimes alone, and unseen by the others; then one would cry, "Give us the number, Hans." And he gave it without an instant's hesitation and in his own peculiar way. For colour, for instance, this truly " uncanny" horse seemed to have rather a better eye than his master, for when bits of coloured stuff were laid out in a row, and Hans was told to fetch certain hues, there arose a difference of opinion between master and horse as to the correct definition of "yellow." There was, as a matter of fact, no pure yellow there, but there was a pale orange rag, and another of a tint that had once possibly been yellow, but was now bleached to almost cream colour. Hans approached the pale orange rag, but Herr von Osten would have none of it, was about to snatch it up, even moved to exclaim, "Hans, you are disgracing yourself!" Hans thereon moved off with an air of offended dignity, yet at a third request he trotted back and with determination voted once more for his orange rag—the only possible best where neither was perfect ; and indeed we all with one voice accepted his choice, and felt it to be but one more evidence of his "reason- ing power."
.3lay old Hans go on and prosper, and continue to instruct his kind in polite learning. I only wish that poor Herr von Osten had lived to see his favourite's character re-established.
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