spiritualism 



To Mrs. Fisher 



Parkstone, Dorset. April 9, 1897. ' 



Mj dear Mrs. Fisher, — I have tried several Keincama- 

 tion and Theosophical books, but cannot read them or take 

 any interest in them. They are so purely imaginative, and 

 do not seem to me rational. Many people are captivated 

 by it — I think most people who like a grand, strange, 

 complex theory of man and nature, given with authority — 

 people who if religious would be Roman Catholics. Crookes 

 gave a suggestive and interesting, but in some ways rather 

 misleading address as President of the Psychical Eesearch 

 Society. I liked Oliver Lodge's address to the Spiritualists' 

 Association better. . . . — Yours very sincerely, 



Alfred E. Wallace. 



In 1891, at the urgent request of Prof. H. Sidgwick, 

 President of the Society for Psychical Eesearch, Prof. 

 Barrett undertook, with considerable reluctance, to make 

 a thorough examination of the subject of ''dowsing" for 

 water and minerals by means of the so-called " divining 

 rod." At the time he fully believed that a critical inquiry 

 of this kind would speedily show all the alleged successes 

 of the dowser to be due either to fraud or a sharp eye for 

 the ground. As the inquiry went on, • to his surprise he 

 found that neither chicanery, nor clever guessing, nor local 

 knowledge, nor chance coincidence could explain away the 

 accumulated evidence, but that something new to science 

 was really at the root of the matter. This result was so 

 startling that Prof. Barrett had to pursue the investiga- 

 tion for six years before venturing to publish his first 

 report, which appeared in the Proceedings of the Society 

 for Psychical Eesearch, Part xxxii., 1897. This was fol- 

 lowed by a second report published some years later, in 

 w^hich he gave a fresh body of evidence on the criticisms 

 of some eminent geologists to whom he had submitted the 

 evidence. The reports were reviewed in Nature with 



205 



