resting on the method) in a year or more of work with Lola
should not herself have perceived that she herself had been producing
by mechanical means the rapped answers of her pupil?

In my opinion the answer is that the authoress was not only not aware
of, but _could not_ in the least have been aware of, the action that
may have passed from herself to the dog so as to bring about the
rapping of the answers; and that on the other hand it is not a question
at all of thinking of a simple mechanical operation of the kind
mentioned above, because in the presumed action of the authoress on the
dog there is no need to have recourse to such a crude hypothesis (as
surely there was no similar action of Krall's on his horses, especially
when they were separated from him). I maintain, in fact, that in
principle, even without any contact by hand, we may still presume that
all the "wonders" obtained by Miss Kindermann are obtainable, taking,
of course, into account the peculiar endowments of the animal we are
dealing with. For if there be any automatism (and there is surely a
good dose of it), it is certainly not a question of a mechanical
automatism (of the type of Neumann's), but quite certainly of a true
and proper _psychic automatism_; a very different thing, and without
doubt much more complex.

In all probability the first condition for the occurrence of genuine
phenomena similar to those attributed to "thinking" animals must be a
very particular psychic relationship between the animal and his master.
And such a relation, although with reluctance, I am compelled to call
of the mediumistic type.

My reluctance is due in part to the very unhappy etymology of the term,
derived from the famous word "medium," so unscientific both in its
origin and in the meaning which some even now wish to associate with
it. But even after having freed it from any "spiritistic" meaning, the
term still leaves me reluctant; for I cannot hide from myself the
weakness of a hypothesis which, in order to explain (only in part) one
enigmatical fact (in this case, that of "thinking animals"), must have
recourse to another unsolved enigma (in this case that of the
"mediumistic phenomena").

However, it will already be something if the two problems are
eventually merged together and so become a single problem; but it is
not my object to explain any psychical facts themselves, whatever they
may be, under which the phenomena of Lola and others of a similar