Journal of Human Science.
Light! More Light! / Know thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind, is man
Other titles: Smith & Powell's Journal of Human Science
1860-1860 Monthly
Cincinnati, OH, and St. Louis, MO.
Editor: William Byrd Powell, M.D., J.W. Smith, Assistant editor.
1/1, January-1/2, February 1860; n.s. 1/1, August 1860-1/5, December 1860.
$1.00 a year, 32 pp.

The first issue lists Cincinnati as the place of publication, to which the second number adds St. Louis. This was primarily devoted to the exposition of William Byrd Powell's views on temperaments and their role in sexual incompatibility, but carried an article by L. Judd Pardee, the editor of Voice of Angels, on the broader topic of "Soul, Spirit, Mind, Thought." Powell (1799-1865) was a "peripatetic head-reader" who "declared his ability to discover a man's religious tenets by the [physical] developments of his head," and, as noted by the eminent scholar JBB, he taught that "the particular temperaments of the man and woman, during the moments of sexual intercourse, determined the well-being of the child they conceived, in a way reminiscent of astrological influences . . . . The mental state of the father and mother were imprinted on the mother's womb as if it were a sensitive photographic plate." Temperament, also, controled the possibility of successful procreation. He was a graduate of Transylvania University of Kentucky and taught at and founded various institutes and schools of the eclectic persuasion around the mid-south. He had a famous collection of some 500 skulls and was a critic of James Rodes Buchanan's scientific claims. He discovered the "Powell Life Line," the line from forehead to the bony protuberance at the back of the head. The distance from that line to the opening of the ear shows the size of the sub-brain or vegetative brain, which predicted longevity (and resulted in some insurance companies taking the Life Line into account in issuing policies). American Antiquarian Socity; Monash University (microfilm).

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