Balance-Press

In 1807, The Balance-Press, located in Hudson, published The Youth’s Companion, or a Historical Dictionary; Consisting of Articles Selected Chiefly from Natural and Civil History, Geography, Astronomy, Zoology, Botany, and Mineralogy; Arranged in Alphabetical Order.

By 1810, Balance-Press had apparently moved to Albany, where it published A Treatise on Magic, or the Intercourse Between Spirits and Men, by Frederick Henry Quitman (1810), and Washington’s Farewell Address (1811).

Excerpt from The Youth’s Companion, page 53: BRAIN, the soft substance within the skull. Mr. Somering thinks it probable that the soul is seated in the fluid of the ventricles of the brain.  He infers this from the fact that the nerves of vision, hearing, taste and smell being all at their origin  in contact with and exposed to the action of the fluid in the ventricles; from the same taking place with regard to the nerves of touch, and those belonging to the organs of the voice and the motion of the eyes; from the impossibility of finding a solid part of the brain into which the terminations of all the nerves can be traced; from the nerves of the finest senses, viz., hearing and seeing being most extensively expanded and most directly in contact with this fluid; from the preternatural increase of this fluid in the ventricles of rickety children, which may perhaps be the cause of their uncommon acuteness of mind and finally, from the fact, that no animal possesses so capacious  and so perfectly organized ventricles as man; they being in the other mammalian (or animals that suckle their young) much smaller than in man, still less in birds, least of all in fishes, and absolutely wanting in insects….Miller.