ELEVEN

Clever Hans Redivivus

Nobody knows the identity of Samuel Rid, or even whether this was his true name or is a literary pseudonym, conceivably of Reginald Scot (S. R. for R. S.?), the author of Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Some of that book was copied, word for word, into The Art of Juggling or Legerdemain (1612), Samuel Rid’s only known work, which variously sets forth illusions with balls, coins, and cards—attributed by Scot to witchcraft—and tricks with dice, abridged from Gilbert Walker’s A Manifest Detection ofDiceplay (1580). Rid’s guide, as was noted by Arthur F. Kinney (1973:263), belongs to the genre “of an instructional manual, forerunner of our how-to-do-it books.” Its arrangement, being an exposé of a variety of discreditable rogues, while being also a handbook for magicians, reminds me of James Randi’s Flim-Flam: The Truth about Parapsychology and Other Delusions (1980).

Rid unexpectedly turns, in his penultimate paragraphs (Kinney 1973:289f.), to “one pretty knack, which is held to be marvelous and wonderful,” namely, “to make a horse tell you how much money you have in your purse.” He leads into his concise account by way of a historical example, of a story of a performing ass of Memphis, in Egypt, followed by one meaty paragraph about a horse, unnamed, which is one “at this day to be seen in London.” There is little doubt that the horse is none other than the celebrated “dancing horse” Morocco, exhibited by a confidence artist named John Banks, usually stated to be a Scot. “This horse,” we are informed by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps (1879:21; written in 1855), “was taught tricks and qualities of a nature then considered so wonderful, that the exhibitor was popularly invested with the powers of magic. . . .” Halliwell-Phillipps reviewed the contemporary literature pertaining to the exploits of Morocco and Banks because they were featured by such famous poets as John Donne and Ben Jonson, among others, and particularly because they are alluded to in William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598:1.ii.51).

Gervase Markham’s curious Cavelarice, an early seventeenth-century work on horsemanship, explains in some detail how “strange Morocco’s dumbe arithmeticke” (as Bishop Hall spoke of its faculty in 1598:iv.2) was drummed into the horse:

Now if you will teach your horse to reckon any number by lifting up and pawing with his feete, you shall first with your rodde, by rapping him upon the shin, make him take his foote from the ground, and by adding to your rod one certaine word, as Up, or such like, now when he will take up his foote once, you shall cherrish him, and give him bread, and when hee sets it uppon the ground, the first time you shall ever say one, then give him more bread, and after a little pause, labour him againe at every motion, giving him a bit of bread til he be so perfit that, as you lift up your rod, so he will lift up his foot, and as you move your rod downeward, so he will move his foot to the ground; and you shall carefully observe to make him in any wise to keep true time with your rod, and not to move his foot when you leave to move your rodde, which correcting him when he offends, both with stroakes and hunger, he will soone be carefull to observe. After you have brought him to this perfectnesse, then you shall make him encrease his numbers at your pleasure, as from one to two, from two to three, and so fourth, till in the end hee will not leave pawing with his foote, so long as ever you move your rod up and downe; and in this by long costume you shall make him so perfect that, if you make the motion of your rod never so little, or hard to bee perceived, yet he will take notice of it; and in this lesson as in the other, you must also dyrect him by your eie, fixing your eyes upon the rod and uppon the horsses feete all the while that you move it; for it is a rule in the nature of horsses, that they have an expeciall regard to the eye, face, and countenaunce of their keepers, so that once after you have brought him to know the helpe of your eye, you may presume he will hardly erre except your eye misguide him; and therefore ever before you make your horse doe any thing, you must first make him looke you in the face. Now after you have made him perfit in these observations, and that he knowes his severall rewardes, both for good and evill dooings, then you may adventure to bryng him into any company or assembly, and making any man think a number, and tell it you in your eare, you may byd the horse tell you what number the man did thinke, and at the end of your speech bee sure to saye last Up: for that is as it were a watch-worde to make him know what hee must doe, and whylest you are talking, you shall make him looke in your face, and so your eye dyrecting him unto your rodde, you may with the motions thereof make him with his foot declare the number before thought by the by-stander. From this you may create a world of other toyes, as how many maydes, howe many fooles, how many knaves, or how many rich men are amongst a mustitude of gazing persons, making the worlde wonder at that which is neyther wonderfull nor scarce artificiall [Halliwell-Phillipps 1879:39-42].

What is so remarkable about Samuel Rid’s exposition five years afterward is its thoroughly modern aspect, couched in the terminology of current semiotic and nonverbal communication studies. Rid says that, for example, the horse’s master

will throw you three dice, and will bid his horse tell how many you or he have thrown. Then the horse paws with his foot whiles the master stands stone still. Then when his master sees he hath pawed so many as the first dice shews itself, then he lifts up his shoulders and stirs a little. Then he bids him tell what is on the second die, and then on the third die, which the horse will do accordingly, still pawing with his foot until his master sees he hath pawed enough, and then stirs. Which, the horse marking, will stay and leave pawing. And note, that the horse will paw an hundred times together, until he sees his master stir. And note also that nothing can be done but his master must first know, and then his master knowing, the horse is ruled by him by signs. This if you mark at any time you shall plainly perceive [Kinney 1973:290].

Every reader of this passage who is familiar with the Clever Hans phenomenon will instantly recognize Rid’s description; some may wonder why Oskar Pfungst, so expert in the methodology of scientific research (Fernald 1984; Sebeok 1983d; and Sebeok 1985c), ignored Rid, so knowledgeable about elementary techniques of conjury.

Rid was not the only one the thorough Pfungst should have known about. The cunning Thomas Dekker, who knew this exhibition well, informs us (1606) that Banks’s feats were accomplished “onely by the eye and the eare,” that is, by nonverbal and verbal signs. Thomas Killigrew gave similar testimony in 1664, mentioning a woman who “governs them with signs and by the eye, as Banks breeds his horse.” These are among many comparable accounts of wondrous horses and other learned domestic animals of all sorts preceding and following the authoritative studies of Pfungst (Christopher 1970:39-54, for instance, discusses some of these; see also Sebeok 1979a, and Sebeok 1981b).

In the 1950s, a distancing transformation took place: although domestic animals continued to be trained to perform seemingly miraculous acts, the emphasis decidedly shifted from the familiar to the exotic—to creatures that dwell in the depths of the oceans, especially dolphins, or in remote African and Indonesian jungles, including most of the great apes (two species of chimpanzees, the gorilla, and the orangutan). While John Banks and his fellows practiced outright deception, for the straightforward and honorable purpose to increase their income, the bully pulpit of today is the academic laboratory, supported with federal funding or by private corporate donations, connived at by irresponsible segments of the media. Lewis M. Branscomb (1985:421) has put the matter elegantly:

I am afraid that a great many scientists deceive themselves from time to time in their treatment of data, gloss over problems involving systematic errors, or understate the contributions of others. These are the ‘honest mistakes’ of science, the scientific equivalent of the ‘little white lies’ of social discourse. But unlike polite society, which easily interprets those white lies, the scientific community has no way to protect itself from sloppy or deceptive literature except to learn whose work to suspect as unreliable. This is a tough sentence to pass on an otherwise talented scientist.

A host of problems stem from self-deception of this sort, as we have documented elsewhere (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1980; Sebeok 1981a; and Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok 1981).

Perhaps of greatest interest to skeptical inquirers should be that both the logic and the cop-outs employed by those who seek to evoke a language propensity or arithmetic proclivity in wild Cetaceans, Pinnipeds, or Primates are, in many particulars, the same as those used by investigators of other paranormal tendencies. These parallels need to be spelled out in a further article.

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This chapter is reprinted from The Skeptical Inquirer 10:4.314-318. It was written, by invitation of the editor, Kendrick Frazier, as a tenth-anniversary essay for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, of which the author is a Fellow.