ct of
psychometry. Early in 1841 I found a very large development of the
organ, in the head of the late Bishop Polk, then at Little Rock, the
capital of Arkansas, who subsequently became a confederate general.
After explaining to him his great sensibility to atmospheric,
electric, and all other physical conditions, he mentioned a still more
remarkable sensibility--that whenever he touched brass, he had
immediately the taste of brass in his mouth, whether he knew what he
was touching or not. I lost no time in verifying this observation by
many experiments upon other persons, and finding that there were many
in whom sensibility was developed to this extent, so that when I
placed pieces of metal in their hands, behind their backs, they could
tell what the metal was by its taste, or some other impression.
Further examinations showed that substances of any kind, held in the
hands of sensitives, yielded not only an impression upon the sense of
taste, by which they might be recognized, but an impression upon the
entire sensibility of the body. Medicines tried in this manner gave a
distinct impression--as distinct as if they had been swallowed--to a
majority of the members of a large medical class, in the leading
medical school at Cincinnati, and to those who had superior
psychometric capacities, the impression given in this manner enabled
them to describe the qualities and effects of the medicines as fully
and accurately as they are given in the works on materia medica.

This method of investigation I consider not only vastly more easy and
rapid than the method adopted by the followers of Hahnemann, but more
accurate and efficient than any other method known to the medical
profession, and destined, therefore, to produce a greater improvement
in our knowledge of the materia medica than we can derive from all
other methods combined, in the same length of time. I may hereafter
publish the practical demonstration of this, but the vast amount of
labor involved in my experimental researches has not yet permitted me
to take up this department, although it has yielded me some very
valuable discoveries.

It may require a century for mankind fully to realize the value of
Psychometry. It has been clearly, though I cannot say completely shown
in the "MANUAL OF PSYCHOMETRY," to which I would refer the reader. I
would simply state that the scientific discovery and exposition of
Psychometry is equivalent to the dawn of new intellectual
ci