260 



DISCOVERY 



a few feet below the surface. The dowser marched to 

 and fro, and fixed on two spots where he said plenty 

 of water would be found within 20 feet from the sur- 

 face, and another adjacent spot where he said no water 

 would be found. 



***** 

 " Then I took him to another field on the other 

 side of the mountain ; here he declared no water 

 would be found any\vhere, the forked twig refusing to 

 move in his hands. A second dowser, a successful 

 amateur, was tried a few weeks later ; he knew no- 

 thing of the previous dowser's visit. His indications 

 exactly coincided with those of the first dowser. 

 Boring apparatus was obtained and a set of bore- 

 holes were made, first in one field, then in the other. 

 The bed-rock was deeper than we thought, and after 

 boring through 16 feet of hard, dry boulder clay, at 

 the spot where the dowser said water would be found, 

 a splendid spring of water was encountered. At the 

 spot, a few yards distant, where the dowser said 

 there was no water, we bored down to the solid rock, 

 and spent a week boring into the rock, but no water 

 was found. At the third place, where he predicted 

 water, we found, on boring, a splendid supply at 

 18 feet below the surface. In the other field on the 

 opjX)site side of the mountain, where the dowser 

 declared no water would be found, we bored in several 

 places down to the solid rock, spending a whole month 

 over it, but not a drop of water was to be found any- 

 where." 



Another thing seems fairly certain, and that is, there 

 is no physical action between the water, or whatever 

 it is that is being sought, and the twig. Murmurs in 

 the literature about electrical, thermal, or radio-active 

 forces show merely the ignorance of the writer in the 

 elements of natural science. Something causes the 

 dowser to twist the twig. This involuntary motion 

 may be due to reflex actions, as in the beating of the 

 heart ; or may be the result of habit, as in walking ; 

 or the result of an emotional disturbance, as in pallor 

 or blushing ; or it may be due to some unconscious 

 self-suggestion. The cause is psychical certainly, and 

 not physical, and a working hypothesis which is sug- 

 gestive rather than explanatory is given as follows 

 by Sir William Barrett : 



***** 



"The explanation will, I believe, be found to be 

 that the dowser possesses a supernormal perceptive 

 faculty, analogous, it may be, to the curious and in- 

 explicable faculties (such as ' homing ') which we find 

 in many birds and animals, and our ignorance of which 

 we cloak by calling them ' instinct." This obscure 

 perceptive power, or instinctive detection of the 

 hidden object of his search, may not excite any con- 

 sciousness of the fact on the part of the dowser, but 

 it may be adequate to produce a nervous stimulus 

 which will start the involuntary muscular action that 

 twists the forked rod, held by the dowser in somewhat 

 unstable equilibrium. 



Several cases equally interesting are quoted. It 

 appears that the dowser, the possessor of this curious 

 faculty, is a rare bird, although pretenders are abun- 

 dant. The late John Mullins, a Somersetshire dowser, 

 was one of the most remarkable, and many of his 

 successful locations in the eighties were striking. On 

 several occasions, after large sums of money had been 

 fruitlessly spent in boring for water, Mullins located 

 water with his twig ; one of the wells so found has 

 produced no less than 3,000 gallons of water an hour 

 for the last thirty years. 



***** 



It seems quite certain that this power is genuine. 

 For more than four hundred years stories describing it 

 have been current. It is impossible to ascribe the 

 successes to coincidence, or to explain the matter by 

 saying that the failures are forgotten and the successes 

 alone remembered. Also, we cannot reasonably 

 declare that every man who tells these curious stories 

 is a liar, drawing entirely on his imagination. On the 

 other hand, it is difficult to see what connection there 

 can be between a man with a piece of wood and an 

 underground well. Why of all things should water 

 be located ? 



" As every student of physics knows, there are many 

 physical phenomena which render such a hypothesis 

 by no means improbable. A nugget of gold concealed 

 in its rock matrix, a piece of metal enveloped within 

 the tnmk of a tree, a coin swallowed by a child, cannot 

 be detected by any of our senses, but in each case the 

 object is at once perceived if, instead of trusting to 

 our visual perception of luminous rays, we trust to 

 the impression made on a photographic plate or 

 fluorescent screen by the shorter X-rays. Many 

 objects quite opaque to our vision are quite trans- 

 parent to ether waves, considerably longer or con- 

 siderably shorter than the luminous waves. Hence, 

 with a suitable detector of those longer or shorter 

 waves, objects which may be completely hidden from 

 our vision can be easily perceived if the object be 

 more or less opaque to these waves. In the working 

 hypothesis I have sketched, the dowser is the ana- 

 logue of the detector of these longer or shorter ether 

 waves, and the subconscious nervous and muscular 

 disturbance produced on the dowser by the hidden 

 object of his search is the analogue of the molecular 

 disturbance produced in the electric coherer or fluor- 

 escent screen or photographic plate." 



