The type of 'mind-reading' George Beard means here is what we today call muscle-reading, which is a term that Beard himself coined. Beard describes several experiments he conducted and describes very clearly the physiology of muscle-reading, and that it is an involuntary muscle contraction that has nothing to do with animal magnetism or thought transference.
1st edition 1877; PDF 10 pages.
word count: 5253 which is equivalent to 21 standard pages of text