The physiologists argued from this that there were minute nerve endings in the skin at least so far apart as the least distance at which the points were felt as two; and that when the points were so close together that they only touched one of these nerve endings, only one sensation was produced.

Mr.T.had already found, working in Germany, that, with practice, the skin gradually became more and more able to discriminate the two points--that is, to feel the two at smaller distances; and, further, that the exercise of the skin in this way on one side of the body not only made that locality more sensitive to minute differences, but had the same effect, singularly, on the corresponding place on the other side of the body.

This, our experimenters inferred, could only be due to the continued suggestion in the mind of the subject that he should feel two points, the result being an actual heightening of the sensibility of the skin.

When he thought that he was becoming more sensitive on one side--and really was--this sense or belief of his took effect in some way in both hemispheres of his brain, and so both sides of the body were alike affected.
[Footnote 10: G.A.Tawney, now professor in Beloit College, and C.W.
Hodge, now professor in Lafayette College.] This led to other experiments in Princeton in which suggestions were actually made to the subjects that they were to become more or less sensitive to distance and direction between the points on the skin, with the striking result that these suggestions actually took effect all over the body.

This was so accurately determined that from the results of the experiments with the compasses on the skin in this case or that, pretty accurate inferences could be made as to what mental suggestions the subject was getting at the time.