ning rod. Carrying the "balancier" on
the tip of the middle finger of his left hand, Campetti--whose
integrity one cannot cavil at--had to touch repeatedly a plate of
zinc or pewter, and had to count aloud the number of touches he
made. The following curious law was found to obtain (that was
probably suggested to the subject by Ritter without his being aware
of it): with the first contact the "balancier" turns to the left,
with the second to the right, and with the third it remains at rest.
At 4 it turns once more to the left, at 5 to the right, at 6 it
remains at rest, etc. It remained immovable only at the so-called
trigonal numbers (3, 6, 9, 15, 21, etc.). Ritter tells us that when
Campetti did not really count or did not think of the number, then
it would not have any influence whatever upon the action of the
instrument. This Ritter ascribes to the agency of electricity (which
in the 18th and 19th centuries was made to play very much the same
role that Satan had played in the 16th and 17th centuries).

The similarity of these two cases and that of Mr. Schillings is
evident. When the questioner of the horse and the bearers of the
"balancier" and of the divining rod are confident of success, they
succeed. When they do not expect success, they fail.]

Hans's seeming knowledge of the value of coins and cards, of the
calendar and the time of day, as well as his ability to recognize
persons or their photographs, can now be readily understood. In all of
these cases, we had to deal, in so far as knowledge is concerned, only
with that of the questioner,--the horse simply tapped the number the
questioner had in mind. The meaning which was supposed to be expressed
by the tapping never existed as far as Hans was concerned; it was only
in the mind of the questioner that the concepts: ace, gold, Sunday,
January, were associated with "1", etc. The same was true with regard to
all other wonderful feats of memory. The sentence: "Bruecke und Weg sind
vom Feinde besetzt", (The road and the bridge are held by the enemy),
which was given to the horse one day and correctly repeated by him on
the following day, was not an answer elicited from the horse by means of
a question, but rather a system of automatic reactions which were
induced by certain involuntary movements of the questioner as stimuli.
Far from showing a wonderful memory in these feats--as is claimed