The Soul of Things - 1863 Author:William Denton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. EXPERIMENTS. Our earliest experiments were by no means as satisfactory as they subsequently became ; the power of the psychometer increasing as... more » the experiments continued. I present many of these, because they show the manifestation of this power as we first became acquainted with it. EXPERIMENT I. Piece of limestone, full of small fossil shells, from Quindaro, Kansas, a small town on the Missouri River. Examined by my sister, Mrs. Cridge. Specimen unseen, and nothing known by her regarding it. "It seems to me there is a deep hole here. Oh, what shells! small shells; so many. I see water; it looks like a river running along. What a high hill! almost perpendicular; it seems as if the water had cut it in two; it is not so high on the other side. The hill is covered with sand and gravel." In this case the present condition of the place, where I obtained the specimen, was given, and, as far as I am acquainted with the spot, it is a very accurate description. This piece of rock had taken in the pictures of the turbid Missouri that swept past it, the hillthat hung over it, and the country in general around it, and, to the eye of the psychometer, they became apparently as plainly visible as to a spectator on the spot. EXPERIMENT II. Piece of quartz from Panama. Examined by my wife, Mrs. Denton. Saw it, but knew nothing respecting it. " I see what looks like a monstrous insect. Its body is covered with shelly rings, and its head is furnished with antennae that are nearly a foot long. It stands with its head against a rock that looks like this. I see an enormous snake coiled up among wild, wiry grass. The climate of the country seems to be much warmer than this; the vegetation is tropical." The animal seen was probably a land crustacean of som...« less