I mention these matters only because they are quite ordinary and because there is nobody who has not made a thousand similar observations. As a rule, we do not notice that these humble manifestations represent sentiments, associations of ideas, inferences, deductions, an absolute and altogether human mental effort. They lack only speech; but speech is merely a mechanical accident which reveals the operations of thought more clearly to us. We are amazed that Mohammed or Zarif should recognize the picture of a horse, a donkey, a hat, or a man on horseback, or that they should spontaneously report to their master the little events that happen in the stable; but it is certain that our own dog is incessantly performing a similar work and that his eyes, if we could read them, would tell us a great deal more. The primary miracle of Elberfeld is that the stallions should have been given the means of expressing what they think and feel. It is momentous; but, when closely looked into, it is not incomprehensible. Between the talking horses and my silent dog there is an enormous distance, but not an abyss. I am saying this not to detract from the nature or extent of the prodigy, but to call attention to the fact that the theory of animal intelligence is more justifiable and less fanciful than one is at first inclined to think. 24 But the second and greater miracle is that man should have been able to rouse the horse from his immemorial sleep, to fix and direct his attention and to interest him in matters that are more foreign and indifferent to him than the variations of temperature in Sirius or Aldebaran are to us. It really seems, when we consider our preconceived ideas, that there is not in the animal an organic and insurmountable inability to do what man's brain does, a total and irremediable absence of intellectual faculties, but rather a profound lethargy and torpor of those faculties. It lives in a sort of undisturbed stolidity, of nebulous slumber. As Dr. Ochorowicz very justly remarks, "its waking state is very near akin to the state of a man walking in his sleep." Having no notion of space or time, it spends its life, one may say, in a perpetual dream. It does what is strictly necessary to keep itself alive; and all the rest passes over it and does not penetrate at all into its hermetically closed imaginings. Exceptional circumstances--some extraordinary need, wish, passion or shock--are required to produce what M. Hachet-Souplet calls "the psychic flash" which suddenly thaws and galvanizes its brain, placing it for a minute in the waking state in which the human brain works normally. Nor is this surprising. It does not need that awakening in order to exist; and we know that nature never makes great superfluous efforts.. "The intellect," as Professor Clarapede well says, "appears only as a makeshift, an instrument which betrays that the organism is not adapted to its environment, a mode of expression which reveals a state of impotence."