Psychic world

COUNTING HORSE! : THE MATHEMATICAL WONDER OF ANIMAL WORLD

Writtten by S NAGARAJAN

Post No.2277

Date: 27 October 2015

Time uploaded in London: 8-09 AM

Thanks for the pictures.

Don’t use pictures. Don’t reblog for at least a week.

SANTHANAM NAGARAJAN

Elberfeld Horses are considered to be the ‘mathematical wonders of the animal world’.

The case was described by Dr E.Clarapide, of Geneva University as ‘THE MOST SENSATIONAL EVENT THAT HAS HAPPENED IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORLD”.

The discovery of equine mathematical genius was made by William Von Osten in 1891. He was an old schoolmaster. He trained his horse by new methods and had produced remarkable results.

Kluge Hans was taught to count skittles by striking with his hoof as many times as there were skittles on the table. Von Osten first pronounced the numbers loud and later wrote them on a blackboard. The results soon proved to be astonishing!

The horse began to perform mathematical operations!

 Osten died of grief from suggestions of trickery, which have been later proved to be unjust.

When Osten died in 1909 his work was continued by Herr Krall, a jeweller of Elberfeld. Krall gave some years of patient application to teaching those of his own horses which exhibited the best aptitude by the same methods.

He trained four horses Muhamed, Zarif, Berto and Hanschen, the latter blind. The horses not only learned the fundamental mathematical operations, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but after only four months training extracted square and cube roots and learned to spell!

They answered questions by stamping with their hoofs.  To give the number 34, for instance, they struck three times with the left and four times with the right hoof.

Krall’s book ‘Denkende Tiere’ stirred the world of science. One commission after another came to his stables. Many scientists persisted in stubborn negations, many went away in awe and wonder.

Maurice Materlink, Belgian playwright and poet (birth 28/8/1862 death: 6/5/1949) paid a visit. Muhamed after a formal introduction, phonetically spelled out his name with his hoofs, solved almost instantaneously problems of which even Materlink did not know the answer, refused to give a square root of a chance number which was afterwards found to have none and expressed thoughts and feelings by spelling.

The procedure was to choose cards with letters on them.

One day Muhamed “Squealed”: The groom struck Hanchen.  Sometimes they  said that they were tired and would not answer.

In the experiments care was taken to exclude the possibility of mind-reading. As a precaution to prevent signals the questions were sometimes asked by telephone, the receiver being hung on the ear of the horse, frequently the problem was written on the blackboard and the horse left alone to solve it, sometimes the figures were traced with a  finger on the animal’s back!

It was a curious fact that after six months of schooling the horses made no further progress.

Among those scientists who testified to the reality of the facts were: Dr Edinger, the eminent neurologist of Frankfurt, Dr H Kramer and Dr H.E.Zeigler of Stuttgart, Dr Paul Sarasis of Basele etc.

Krall also experimented with a young elephant, Kens, but the beast was too lazy to learn.

On the counting horses no satisfactory explanation was ever reached.

Note: Readers who are interested to know more, may visit

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/12th-april-1913/16/the-horses-of-elberfeld. The Spectator archive published a letter in its 12^th April 1913 issue in Page 16.

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