Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 September 1893 — Man as a Mageut. [ARTICLE]

Man as a Mageut.

The old-time superstitious belief that human beings should sleep with their heads toward the north is now believed to be based upon a scientific principle. Some Frenoh savants have made experiments upon the body of a criminal who had suffered death, and these tests go to prove lhat each human body is in itself an electric battery, one electrode being represented by the head and the other by the feet. The body of the subject upon which the queer experiments mentioned above were made was taken immediately after death and placed upon a pivotal board, free to move in any direction. After some little vacillation the head portion turned toward the north and remained there stationary. One of the experimenters took hold of the pivot and turned it so that the head pointed south, but upon being freed it almost immediately resumed the first-named position —turned until tbe head pointed north. To prove that this was neither accident nor coincident upon muscular twitching, as some bad suggested, the board waa repeatedly turned half around and then freed, but always with similar results.