Literary Adventures

This page will take you into pieces of literature that are carefully selected for their great content at the literary, scientific, or philosophical level. A short selection will be presented in full. A long one will be divided into sections that will be refreshed regularly. Emphasis and highlights are mostly ours, not made by the original author.

Here is our current selection:

Supernature By Lyall Watson

Part One - Cosmos

3 - The Physics Of Life

We choose to live. We have to choose, because a hundred million impulses pour down on our nervous system every second and, if we were to accept them all, we would soon be overwhelmed and die in confusion. So the input is monitored and carefully controlled; of all the millions of incoming signals, only a small number reach the brain and a still smaller number get passed on to those areas where they can give rise to conscious awareness.

A tape recording always seems to pick up more background noise than there is in a real-life situation, but sounds such as passing traffic and the ticking of a clock are there all the time - our brain just ignores them. All life is selective in this way. From the background of continuous clamor, what Milton called 'the dismal universal hiss', an organism makes its choice. The chosen pieces are not necessarily the most dramatic stimuli - the loudest sounds or the brightest lights; very often they are subtle changes in the environment made conspicuous only because of their incongruity. While director of a zoo I was once obliged to keep a pair of bat-eared foxes in my house. These are tiny, delicate desert animals with huge, leaf-shaped ears that quiver and scan like radar antennas, constantly seeking out new sounds. Heavy vehicles thundered down a thoroughfare past the house, often loud enough to drown out conversation with their clamor and vibration, but even in the midst of this confusion the foxes were able to hear sounds as soft as the furtive rustle of cellophane two rooms away and would appear like magic on the arm of my chair to find out what I was unwrapping.

Living organisms select, from the barrage of electromagnetic waves in their environment, only those frequencies likely to contain the best information. Earth's atmosphere reflects or absorbs large parts of the spectrum coming in from space: infrared and ultraviolet radiation are partly eliminated, but visible light, with a wavelength intermediate between these two, passes almost unimpaired. So it is no accident that life should be very sensitive to this potentially valuable source of intelligence. Human vision responds to wavelengths from 380 to 760 millimicrons, which is exactly the range of frequencies least affected by the protective blanket of the atmosphere. We get a selective picture of the cosmos through a number of narrow windows of this kind in our sensory system.

It used to be said that there were only five such windows: those of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. But our ideas of the architecture of life are being continually revised as we discover new senses in ourselves and new combinations of the old ones in other species. Bats 'see' with their ears, building up accurate pictures of their environment by sending out high-frequency sounds and listening to the patterns of returning echoes. Rattlesnakes 'see' with their skin, following the movements of prey in complete darkness with heat-sensitive cells in two shallow dimples between their eyes. Flies 'taste' with their feet, trampling their food first to find out whether it is worth eating. The whole body is a sense organ, and most apparently supernatural abilities turn out on close examination to be variables of this kind, developed by a particular species to meet its own special needs.

In the red, muddy rivers of central Africa live a family of fish called mormyrids. They include some of the most peculiar-looking fish in the world, elongated and stiff-backed, with tiny eyes and drooping, elephant-trunk snouts. Some of them grub in the thick mud for worms, most of them operate only at night, and all of them have an extraordinary ability to respond to stimuli invisible to man. If a comb is drawn through hair, it becomes electrified with the power of less than one millionth of a volt, and yet, if such a comb is held near the glass on the outside of an aquarium containing a mormyrid, the fish reacts violently to the minute electrical field produced in the water.

Professor Lissmann of Cambridge has kept one species of mormyrid, Gymnarchus niloticus, for almost twenty years and made a detailed study of its strange world. (200) In spite of its degenerate eyes, which can only just tell the difference between light and dark, this fish maneuvers with precision in and out of obstacles, darting after other small fish, on which it feeds. Lissmann has discovered that it 'sees' with electricity, which it generates in an electric organ made of a battery of muscles in its long, pointed tail. By dipping a pair of electrodes into the water, he found that the fish was sending out a constant stream of small electrical discharges at the rate of about three hundred per second. During each discharge, the tip of the tail becomes momentarily negative with respect to the head and Gymnarchus acts like a bar magnet, producing a field with lines of force that radiate out from it in a spindle shape. In open water the field is symmetrical, but an object nearby distorts the field and the fish feels this is an alteration of the electrical potential on its skin. The sensory cells are small pores on the head which are filled with a jelly-like substance that reacts to the field and sends information on to a special electrical sense area in the head which is so large that it covers the rest of the brain like a spongy hat.

Lissmann trained Gymnarchus to come to food hidden behind one of two similar ceramic pots at one end of its aquarium. The fish cannot see or smell the contents of the pots, but the walls are porous, and when soaked in water, present no obstacle to an electrical field. By using its electric location sense, Gymnarchus was able to tell the difference between tap water and distilled water, or between a glass rod one millimeter thick and another two millimeters thick, and always went for food to the pot that was the best conductor. If two or more fish are operating in the same area, they avoid confusion by adopting a slightly different frequency, which gives each individual its own distinctive electrical voice. When electrodes are connected to a loudspeaker and dipped into the water near the riverbank where the fish rest up during the day, one can hear a bewildering confusion of rattles, hums, and whistles as they conduct their electronic conversations.

Gymnarchus can tell the difference between living and nonliving objects, even when the living one is completely stationary. It does not use shape as a clue, because it can distinguish a live fish from a dead one of the same species, so presumably it responds to an electrical signal of some kind. (199) Lissmann had found that many species of fish that are supposedly non-electric, do in fact put out strong discharges, and he suggests that they are in the process of developing an electric system of location, or may already use it to supplement their normal senses. Every time a muscle contracts, it changes its potential, so it is possible that a living organism, in which there is always some muscular activity going on, produces a field strong enough to be recognised by the specialist such as Gymnarchus. All the highly electrical organisms known live in water, which is a good conductor. Air is a poor conductor, and a much greater source of power would be necessary for effective navigation. No species seems to have found the effort of developing such a system worthwhile, but it seems that all life forms can produce and perhaps recognise a weak electrical field.

Life Fields

Harold Burr, of Yale, demonstrated life fields with one of the most simple and elegant biological experiments ever made. He started with the principle of the dynamo, which is a machine that produces electricity from some purely mechanical source such as falling water or a passing wind. In its most simple form, the dynamo consists of an armature, usually a loop of copper wire, which is rotated inside a magnetic field so that it makes and breaks the field in rapid alternation. This produces an electric current. In Burr's experiment, the dynamo consisted of a live salamander floating in a dish of salt water. He assumed that the salamander, which is a small amphibian that looks a little like a lizard, was producing a field and that he would be able to interrupt this field and generate a current. So he chose salt water, which conducts electricity almost as well as copper wire, as his armature and rotated the dish around and around the floating salamander. It did break the field, and electrodes immersed in the water soon began to pick up a current. When this was fed into a galvanometer to measure the charge, the needle was deflected to the left and then to the right in the regular negative and positive pattern of a perfect alternating current. If the dish was rotated without the floating amphibian, no current was produced.

Having proved that even a small, fairly slow-moving animal produces its own electric field, Burr went on to develop an instrument sensitive enough to measure the potential of the field. (57) He adapted a standard vacuum-tube voltmeter by giving it a very high resistance in order to prevent it from affecting the voltage by taking any current from the animal being measured. This meter he equipped with a scale and two perfectly matched silver-chloride electrodes. These are never put into actual contact with the specimen being measured, but are separated from it by a bridge of special paste or a salt solution of the same ionic concentration as the organism itself.

Burrs' first test with the instrument was on a number of student volunteers. (60) The electrodes were fed into two small dishes of salt solution and the subjects placed their index fingers in the dishes, then reversed them to give an average reading. This was done at the same time every day for over a year, and Burr found that each person showed a small daily fluctuation, but that all the female students produced one huge increase in voltage, lasting about twenty-four hours, once each month. These changes seemed to take place near the middle of the menstrual cycle, and Burr thought they might coincide with ovulation. To test this idea, he turned to work on rabbits. The female rabbit has no regular menstrual cycle or breeding season, but true to her fertile reputation, can breed at any time. Like many small mammals, she is a 'shock ovulator'. All that is necessary is that the male should be rough enough during mating to stimulate the cervix strongly (some species even have an explosive dart in the penis for doing this), and ovulation occurs about nine hours later. Burr stimulated a female rabbit artificially, waited eight hours, anesthetised it, opened it, and placed his electrodes on the ovary. While the voltage pattern was being continuously recorded, he watched the ovary through a microscope. To his enormous delight, there was a dramatic change in the voltage at the exact moment that he saw the follicle rupture and release an egg. (56)

Ovulation causes a marked change in the body's electrical field. This finding was confirmed on a human subject who was about to undergo an operation but agreed to postpone it until Burr's voltmeter indicated that ovulation was taking place. (58) When her ovaries were uncovered in the operating theater, one contained a follicle that had just ruptured. This discovery of an electrical method of detecting ovulation, which is so simple that the subject just has to dangle her fingers in bowls of water, has been put forward as a system of birth control for those who cannot bring themselves to trust Eugen Jonas' lunar timetables. Both systems are far safer than the purely mathematical rhythm method, which, as many women have discovered to their dismay, makes no allowance for what can be a big variation in the time of ovulation. Burr's method has now also been used to ensure conception and for timing artificial insemination, but it does not end there.

Having discovered that a life field exists and that changes in the field are not random but connected with basic biological events, Burr wondered if the field would also be influenced by disruptions produced by disease. He took his equipment to an obstetrician, and together they tested over a thousand women in New York's Bellevue Hospital. (59) In 102 cases, they found abnormal gradients between the abdomen and the cervix, and in subsequent surgery for other complaints, ninety-five of these women proved to have malignant cancer of either the cervix or the uterus. So the life field changes even before the symptoms of the disease become manifest, and once the changes are understood, it seems likely to become a valuable early warning system and diagnostic aid. Burr goes even further than this: He claims that the gradient of the electrical response is directly connected to the rate of healing and that he can use his voltmeter as a sort of super X ray. (55) Internal scars do not show up well on normal equipment, but Burr has been able to determine the condition of surgical wounds just by following the changes in the external life field.

This field is one concerned with direct-current potentials and has nothing to do with brain waves or the impulses recorded by an electrocardiograph. Every time the heart beats or the brain is stimulated, it produces a measurable electric charge, but the life field seems to be the sum-total effect of these and all the other small electric charges that occur as a result of chemical events that continually take place in the body. The life field can be measured even with the electrodes held a little way from the skin, which indicates that it is a true field effect and not merely a surface electrical potential.

The field persists as long as life lasts, undergoing regular small changes in healthy subjects and more dramatic aberrations in a diseased subject. Measured over a long period, the rise and fall of voltage can be plotted in steady cycles that indicate the time when an individual is at his best and the times when his vitality is diminished and his efficiency is likely to suffer. In a healthy person, the cycles are so regular that they could be used to predict 'high' and 'low' times weeks in advance and warn someone in a hazardous occupation such as motor racing of days when he should take extra care or even stay at home in bed. In this respect, we are getting very close again to astrology, which specialises in predicting times that will be 'auspicious' or 'unfavorable' for undertaking particular projects, so it is not surprising to discover that changes in the life field follow a cosmic rhythm.

It is obviously impossible to keep a man tied to a voltmeter for months on end, but there is a magnificent old maple tree in New Haven, Connecticut, that has been wired up for thirty years of continuous recording. (52) Analysis of this record shows irregular patterns produced by electrical disturbance from nearby thunderstorms and local fluctuations in earth's magnetic field, but it also shows that the tree responds to a 24-hour solar rhythm, a 25-hour lunar rhythm, and a longer lunar cycle that reaches its peak as the full moon passes directly overhead. Only one long-term study of this kind has been made on man.

Leonard Ravitz made continuous recordings of several months that showed that the life field reaches a maximum positive value at full moon and a maximum negative value two weeks later, at new moon. (267) We know that the passage of the sun, moon, and planets all produce variations in magnetic conditions that radically alter the earth's field. And now we know that living things have their own fields, which are in turn influenced by changing patterns in the earth. The chain is complete. Here is a natural and measurable mechanism that can account for the connection between man and the cosmos. The supernatural makes way for Supernature.

The idea of having an electrical field we cannot see or hear or taste is in itself rather mysterious, so it is worth explaining that a field does not exist in its own right. It is simply an area in which certain things happen. If an electrical charge is brought into an electrical field, forces will act on it. Every atom carries an electrical charge and is therefore acted on by the field of an organism. Even a simple, single-celled animal such as Euglena has its own field and builds atoms and molecules into its structure, modifying its field by incorporating their charges. So a complex organism has a composite field which is a sum of all its component parts. This field can be measured as a whole to get the 'flavor' of the entire structure, or separate measurements can be made of organs and perhaps even of individual cells within the organism. Each component has its own function and develops its own potential as a result of that function. Burr has been examining these differences and has come up with an exciting discovery.

He introduced microelectrodes into a newly laid frog egg and found that, even before the egg began to divide and develop into a tadpole, he could measure voltage differences in those parts of the egg that were due to become the nervous system. (50) The egg material that would eventually serve the function of communication was already displaying the voltage characteristic of that part of the organism. This implies that the life field has an organising ability, that it is a kind of template, which lays down the form and function of the organism being developed. Edward Russell has seized on this one example of anticipation and elaborated it into a thesis just published as Design for Destiny. He sees the field as an integrating mechanism that not only designs the organism but lives on after it dies, as the soul. (285)

It would be splendid to find scientific proof of the soul, as advertised on the jacket of Russell's book, but I regret that this is not it. Burr took measurements from the frog egg that enabled him to predict where its future nerve cord would be formed, but at no point does he claim that the life field of the egg was identical to that of the adult frog. It would have to be the same if it existed before the frog as a blueprint, lived with it as intelligence, and survived it as a soul. All the available evidence points in the opposite direction. Burr showed that a life field deviated from the normal as an early warning signal of disease, but certainly never claimed that the change in the field produced the disease. His work demonstrates instead that the life field is very much a product of life, providing an accurate electronic mirror image in which certain details are detectable before they become apparent to our other senses. Life produces the life field, and when life dies, the field dies with it. Gymnarchus cannot distinguish a dead fish from a wax model.

During its life, any change in an organism is reflected by a change in its field. Burr proved this with another neat experiment. When two pure strains of corn are crossed, they produce a cob that contains a mixture of pure-breeding and hybrid seeds. These look identical, and internally they differ only in the arrangement of one small gene, which cannot be seen even with an electron microscope. But Burr showed that they had different electric potentials, and he was able to sort the seeds successfully into pure and hybrid plants just by using his voltmeter. (51) This is reminiscent of the astrologers successfully predicting later life patterns on the basis only of the horoscope, and it is worth pursuing the analogy. The measurement of electrical potential is like the identification of a rising sign: both are indicative of a pattern of events, but neither is a determining factor in itself. The life field is a vital discovery, but it is not the secret of life or of survival after death. It is more of a means to an end, a key to the understanding of Supernature.

One result of the new research into life and electricity is a theory that could explain how life is influenced by events outside our solar system. Together with light from the stars, we also receive an equivalent amount of energy in the form of very-short-wavelength cosmic rays. Most of these are absorbed in the atmosphere, where their energy is used partly to turn carbon dioxide into the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which gets into all living things and provides us with a way of dating many fossils. The rest of the energy from this cosmic bombardment goes into ionising the air, breaking up the gases into atoms that carry electrical charges. This charged air gathers at about sixty miles above the earth's surface in a layer called the ionosphere, which reflects the longer radio waves and makes it possible for us on the ground to send radio signals beyond the horizon by bouncing them off this invisible ceiling.

Part of the ionised air seeps down to lower layers of the atmosphere as ozone, which has a marked effect on life. In a concentration of only one part in four million parts of air, ozone kills many bacteria and is sometimes injected into the air conditioning of mines and underground railways for this purpose. (213) We can detect ozone in this concentration by its fresh, sort of seaside, smell, but we are also aware of ionised air in much lower concentrations and can even distinguish between positive and negative charges. (185) Air with a preponderance of positive ions has a depressing effect on man, while negative ions tend to be more stimulating. There is no way in which we could make distinctions of this kind without ourselves carrying an electrical charge that either attracts or repels particles around us. Ravitz showed that our fields are positively charged at full moon, so at this time we would attract negative ions to us and be more stimulated. (267) Which provides an elegant explanation for the fact that psychotic characters go into their manic phases at this time and that everyone bleeds more easily at full moon. The life field forms a perfect mechanism for linking us with cyclical events in our environment.

The moon produces tides in water, air, and earth, which alter the magnetic field, and this in turn affects the charge on our life fields. To accentuate this change and make us even more aware of the lunar rhythm as a basic timekeeper, cosmic rays produce ionised air, which reacts with our field and exaggerates our responses. We are sensitive to the moon, but this sensitivity is modified by events that originate many light-years away. Once again we find complex interrelationships that make earth and every living thing on it an integral part of the cosmos.

At the opposite end of the spectrum to the tiny cosmic rays are some very long waves, whose origins also seem to lie outside our solar system. The frequency of these waves is measured in tiny fractions of a cycle per second, their wavelength being millions of miles, and their energy is so weak as to be barely measureable, but we seem to be aware of them. A study made in Germany on fifty-three thousand people found that they took longer to respond to normal stimuli when waves of this length were passing by. (182) It is highly significant that the pattern of these very-low-frequency waves is almost indistinguishable from the patterns an electroencephalograph records in the human brain.

Brain Waves

Electrophysiology began in the middle of the eighteenth century, soon after methods of generating electricity became available. At first the experiments were rather wild: it is reported that Louis XV in an idle moment 'caused an electric shock from a battery of Leyden jars to be administered to 700 Carthusian monks joined hand to hand, with prodigious effect'. (335) Later an awareness grew that not only was all living tissue sensitive to electric currents but the tissue itself generated small voltages, which changed dramatically when it was injured or became active. In 1875 an English physician found that the brain also produced such currents. The early experiments were done on the exposed brains of frogs and dogs, but as soon as more sensitive equipment was invented, investigations began in earnest on intact animals and men. In 1928 Hans Berger discovered that the current produced by the brain was not constant, but flowed in a rhythmic wave pattern, which he demonstrated on his 'Elektrenkephalogram'.

Today Berger's single wobbly line has been broken up into many components by instruments that can detect fluctuations as small as one ten-millionth of a volt. To give some idea of the minuteness of such a current, it would take about thirty million of them to light a small flashlight bulb. Hidden in the confusion of these very subtle stimuli are four basic rhythmic patterns, which have been named alpha, beta, delta, and theta. Delta rhythms are the slowest, running between 1 and 3 cycles a second, and are most prominent in deep sleep. Theta rhythms are those with a frequency of 4 to 7 cycles a second, which seem to be connected with mood. From 8 to 12 cycles are the alpha rhythms, which occur most often in relaxed meditation and are disrupted by attention. And beta rhythms, between 13 and 22 cycles per second, seem to be confined to the frontal area of the brain, where complex mental processes take place.

Early research into these rhythms was confined to simple experiments such as the effect of opening and closing the eyes, doing mental arithmetic, and taking drugs, but the results were very meager. To find out more about the scope and sensitivity of the brain, Grey Walter and his associates decided in 1946 to try imposing new patterns of the existing brain rhythms through the senses. They began by flashing a light at regular intervals into the subject's eyes and found that this flicker produced new, strange patterns on the graphs. At certain frequencies the flicker also produced violent reactions in the subject, who was suddenly seized by what seemed to be an epileptic fit.

Walter turned immediately to the study of the normal, resting brain waves of known epileptics and found that their brain rhythms were grouped in certain frequencies. 'It was as if certain major chords constantly appeared against the trills and arpeggios of the normal activity.' This harmonic grouping suggested to him that all that was necessary to get the rhythms to synchronise in a tremendous explosion was an outside co-ordinator, a conductor who could bring the separate chords together into a simultaneous grand convulsion. A flicker somewhere in the alpha-rhythm range, between 8 and 12 cycles a second, acted in just this way on epileptics, provoking them into a seizure at any time. This technique has now become a valuable clinical aid in the diagnosis of epilepsy, but it has also been discovered that a large number of otherwise normal people show a similar response under certain conditions.

Walter examined hundreds of people who had never had any kind of fit or attack and found that about one in every twenty responded to carefully adjusted flicker. They experienced 'strange feelings' or faintness or swimming in the head; some became unconscious for a few moments or their limbs jerked in rhythm with the light. As soon as any such sensation was reported, the flicker was turned off to prevent a complete convulsion. In other subjects, the flicker had to be exactly matched with the brain rhythm to produce any effects. A feedback circuit, in which the flashing light was actually fired by the brain signals themselves, produced immediate epileptic seizures in more than half the people tested.

Driving down a tree-lined avenue with the sun flickering through the trunks at a certain rhythm can be very disturbing. There is a record of a cyclist who passed out on several occasions while traveling home down such an avenue. In his case the momentary unconsciousness stopped him from pedaling, so he slowed down to a speed at which the flicker no longer affected him and came around in time to save himself from falling. But a motorcar has more momentum, and the chances are that it would keep going at the critical speed and influence the driver long enough to make him lose control altogether. There is no way of knowing how many fatal crashes have occurred in this way.

In another case, a man found that every time he went to the cinema he would suddenly find that he was consumed by an overwhelming desire to strangle the person sitting next to him. On one occasion he even came to his senses to discover that he had his hands clutched around his neighbor's throat. When he was tested, it was found that he developed violent limb jerking when the flicker was set at twenty-four cycles per second, which is exactly the rhythm of film recorded at twenty-four frames a second.

The implications of this discovery are enormous. Every day we are exposed to flicker in some way and run the risk of illness or fatal fits. The flash rate of fluorescent lights at 100 to 120 per second is too high for convulsions, but who knows what effect it may be having on those exposed to it for many hours each day. The British Acoustical Society has become concerned about the low-frequency vibration produced by motor vehicles running at sustained speed. (318) These 'infrasounds' are at the level of 10 to 20 cycles per second, which is below the limit of human hearing, but they can affect us in the same way as flickering lights. The Society warns that these sounds can produce symptoms of recklessness, euphoria, lower efficiency, and dizziness due to loss of balance. They believe that infrasounds are responsible for the way in which some drivers wander across the central strip of high-speed roads apparently quite oblivious to the danger of oncoming traffic, and that the vibrations may account for a large number of otherwise inexplicable accidents.

Professor Gavraud is an engineer who almost gave up his post at an institute in Marseilles because he always felt ill at work. He decided against leaving when he discovered that the recurrent attacks of nausea only worried him when he was in his office at the top of the building. Thinking that there must be something in the room that disturbed him, he tried to track it down with devices sensitive to various chemicals, and even with a Geiger counter, but he found nothing until one day, nonplussed, he leaned back against the wall. The whole room was vibrating at a very low frequency. The source of this energy turned out to be an air-conditioning plant on the roof of a building across the way, and his office was the right shape and the right distance from the machine to resonate in sympathy with it. It was this rhythm, at seven cycles per second, that made him sick.

Fascinated by the phenomenon, Gavraud decided to build machines to produce infrasound so that he could investigate it further. In casting around for likely designs, he discovered that the whistle with a pea in it issued to all French gendarmes produced a whole range of low-frequency sounds. So he built a police whistle six feet long and powered it with compressed air. The technician who gave the giant whistle its first trial blast fell down dead on the spot. A post-mortem revealed that all his internal organs had been mashed into an amorphous jelly by the vibrations.

Gavraud went ahead with his work more carefully and did the next test out of doors, with all observers screened from the machine in a concrete bunker. When all was ready, they turned the air on slowly - and broke the windows of every building within half a mile of the test site. Later they learned to control the amplitude of the infrasound generator more effectively and designed a series of smaller machines for experimental work. One of the most interesting discoveries to date is that the waves of low frequency can be aimed and that two generators focused on a particular point even five miles away produce a resonance that can knock a building down as effectively as a major earthquake. These frequency-7 machines can be built very cheaply, and plans for them are available for three French francs from the Patent Office in Paris.

For many years now, seismic waves have been recorded in the same way as brain waves. Seismographs have been developed that are sensitive enough to pick up vibrations in the ground that we cannot consciously perceive. These records show when earthquakes are taking place even on the farthest side of the earth. During the Chilean earthquake of May 1960, for instance, the whole planet rang like a gong with long-wave oscillations that had periods of up to an hour. But it has now been discovered that an earthquake is also accompanied by, and preceded by, periods of low-frequency vibrations that fall into the range from seven to fourteen cycles per second. These start minutes before the first obvious shocks of the quake itself and provide an early-warning system to which many species seem to respond.

The Japanese, who live right on a fracture system, have always kept goldfish for this reason. When the fish begin to swim about in a frantic way, the owners rush out of doors in time to escape being trapped by falling masonry. The fish have the advantage of living in a medium that conducts vibrations well, but even animals living in the air are able to pick up warning signals. Hours before an earthquake, rabbits and deer have been seen running in terror from the epicenter zones. Some people, particularly women and children, are also sensitive to these frequencies.

The fact that the frequencies coincide with those that make people disturbed and ill would account for the wild, unreasoning fear that goes with an earthquake. F. Kingdon-Ward lived through the great Assam shock of 1951 and described his feelings at the time. (175) 'Suddenly, after the faintest tremor (felt by my wife but not by me) there came an appalling noise and the earth began to shudder violently... the outlines of the landscape, visible against the starry sky, blurred - every ridge and tree fuzzy - as though it were moving rapidly up and down ... the first feeling of bewilderment - an incredulous astonishment that these solid-looking hills were in the grip of a force which shook them as a terrier shakes a rat - soon gave place to stark terror.' This earthquake was a major one in which they were in great danger, but the feelings of terror seem to have no connection with the magnitude of the tremor. I remember running outside during a small earthquake in Crete in 1967 and, despite the fact that I was perfectly safe out of doors and was fascinated by what was going in, feeling an irrational fear so deep-seated that I was unable to sleep indoors for more than a week.

Vibrations of a frequency too low to hear could account for the feelings of depression and fear that seem to be attached to certain places. Many people feel intensely uncomfortable on the island of Santorini, in the southern Aegean, and few visitors stay more than a day or two. This island, which is now believed by some to be the site of old Atlantis, erupted violently in 1450 BC and suffered an earthquake in 1956. Since the recent disaster, a seismological station has been established there, which reports a constant undercurrent of very-low-frequency murmurs. Earth gives her warnings in a soft, low voice.

An unexpected discovery was made as a result of the Tashkent quake of 1966. For a year prior to the shock, scientists had been surprised to find that there were increased concentrations of the inert gas argon in the city's water supply, which comes from deep artesian wells. On April 25 this had reached four times its normal level, and on the 26th the earthquake struck. The day following the disaster, the argon concentration was back to its normal level. The reason for the change is not known, but it forms yet another of those inconspicuous clues to which life may well be able to respond like magic.

The one thing that earth tremors, air tides, and cosmic rays all have in common is that they operate on very low energy and send out extremely subtle signals. The apparently supernatural ability of life to respond to stimuli such as the position of the unseen moon, the concentration of invisible ions, and the minute magnetic influence of a planet on the horizon can all be attributed to a single physical phenomenon - the principle of resonance.

Resonance

If a tuning fork designed to produce a frequency of 256 cycles a second (that is, middle C), is sounded anywhere near another fork with the same natural frequency, the second one will begin to vibrate gently in sympathy with the first, even without being touched. Energy has been transferred from one to the other. An insect without ears would not be able to hear the sound of the first fork, but if it were sitting on the second one, it would very soon become aware of the vibration - and thus of events taking place beyond its normal sphere. This is what Supernature is all about.

An event in the cosmos sets up the vibration of electromagnetic waves, which travel across space and create an equivalent vibration by resonance with some part of earth that has the same natural frequency. Life may respond to these stimuli directly, but more often it reacts by resonating in sympathy with part of its immediate environment. A flashing light on the same frequency as a brain rhythm produces resonance and alarming effects, even though the flicker may be too fast for us to see. A very weak electrical or magnetic field becomes noticeable because it resonates on the same frequency as the life field of the organism reacting to it. In this way, very subtle stimuli, too small to make any impression on the normal senses, are magnified and brought to our notice. The supernatural becomes part of natural history.

In most musical instruments, sound is produced by strings, stretched membranes, rods, or reeds, and an important part of all of them is a structure that increases the area of contact these vibrators have with the air. A guitar string has a sounding box and a clarinet reed has a pipe. The shape of the structure determines the way in which the air will resonate and the quality of the sound. Shape and function are very closely related, not only for the sender of the signal but also for the receiver. If the listener is to hear the sound properly, he cannot sit in a room of the wrong shape or wear a football helmet.

Ultimately, sensitivity to sound depends on vibrations being set up in the fluid of the inner ear, but the sound first has to be collected by the external ear. In man, the passage between the eardrum and the outside world is funnel-shaped, with the walls making an angle of about 30 degrees to the drum. This is exactly the angle best suited to magnification of sounds in the critical range. The most popular, and therefore presumably the most effective, old-fashioned ear trumpet is one that also has this angle of 30 degrees. This could be just coincidence, but I doubt it.

Sound, of course, is a vibration that can be conducted only through an elastic medium; it cannot travel through a vacuum. Electromagnetic waves do travel through free space, and we know far less about the factors governing their resonance. There is, however, one quite extraordinary piece of evidence which suggests that shape could be important in receiving even cosmic stimuli. It comes from those favorites of mystics throughout the ages - the pyramids of Egypt.

The pyramids on the west bank of the Nile were built by the pharaohs as royal tombs and date from about 3000 BC. The most celebrated are those at Giza, built during the fourth dynasty, of which the largest is the one that housed the pharaoh Khufu, better known as Cheops. This is now called the Great Pyramid. Some years ago it was visited by a Frenchman named Bovis, who took refuge from the midday sun in the pharaoh's chamber, which is situated in the center of the pyramid, exactly one third of the way up from the base.

He found it unusually humid there, but what really surprised him were the garbage cans that contained, among the usual tourist litter, the bodies of a cat and some small desert animals that had wandered into the pyramid and died there. Despite the humidity, none of them had decayed but just dried out like mummies. He began to wonder whether the pharaohs had really been so carefully embalmed by their subjects after all, or whether there was something about the pyramids themselves that preserved bodies in a mummified condition.

Bovis made an accurate scale model of the Cheops pyramid and placed it, like the original, with the base lines facing precisely north-south and east-west. Inside the model, one third of the way up, he put a dead cat. It became mummified, and he concluded that the pyramid promoted rapid dehydration. Reports of this discovery attracted the attention of Karel Drbal, a radio engineer in Prague, who repeated the experiment with several dead animals and concluded, 'There is a relation between the shape of the space inside the pyramid and the physical, chemical, and biological processes going on inside the space. By using suitable forms and shapes, we should be able to make processes occur faster or delay them.' (233)

Drbal remembered an old superstition which claimed that a razor left in the light of the moon became blunted. He tried putting one under his model pyramid, but nothing happened, so he went on shaving with it until it was blunt, and then put it back in the pyramid. It became sharp again. Getting a good razor blade is still difficult in many Eastern European countries, so Drbal tried to patent and market his discovery. The patent office in Prague refused to consider it until their chief scientist had tried building a model himself and found that it worked. So the Cheops Pyramid Razor Blade Sharpener was registered in 1959 under the Czechoslovakian Republic Patent No. 91304, and a factory soon began to turn out miniature cardboard pyramids. Today they make them in styrofoam.

The edge of a razor blade has a crystal structure. Crystals are almost alive, in that they grow by reproducing themselves. When a blade becomes blunted, some of the crystals on the edge, where they are only one layer thick, are rubbed off. Theoretically, there is no reason why they should not replace themselves in time. We know that sunlight has a field that points in all directions, but sunlight reflected from an object such as the moon is partly polarised, vibrating mostly in one direction. This could conceivably destroy the edge of a blade left under the moon, but it does not explain the reverse action of the pyramid. We can only guess that the Great Pyramid and its little imitations act as lenses that focus energy or as resonators that collect energy, which encourages crystal growth. The pyramid shape itself is very much like that of a crystal of magnetite, so perhaps it builds up a magnetic field. I do not know the answer, but I do know that it works. My record so far with Wilkinson Sword blades is four months of continuous daily use. I have a feeling that the manufacturers are not going to like this idea.

Try it yourself. Cut four pieces of heavy cardboard into isosceles triangles with the proportion base to sides of 15.7 to 14.94. Tape these together so that the pyramid stands exactly 10.0 of the same units high. Orient it precisely so that the base lines face magnetic north-south and east-west. Make a stand 3.33 units high and place it directly under the apex of the pyramid to hold your objects. The sharp edges of the blade should face east and west. Keep the whole thing away from electrical devices.

I have discovered that the speed of dehydration of organic materials depends very much on the substance involved and on the weather conditions. This much one would expect, but I tried keeping the same objects - eggs, rump steak, dead mice - in both pyramid and in an ordinary shoe box, and the ones in the pyramid preserved quite well while those in the box soon began to smell and had to be thrown out. I am forced to conclude that a cardboard replica of the Cheops pyramid is not just a random arrangement of pieces of paper, but does have special properties.

There is a fascinating postscript to this pyramid story. In 1968 a team of scientists from the United States and from Ein Shams University in Cairo began a million-dollar project to X-ray the pyramid of Chephren, successor to Cheops. They hoped to find new vaults hidden in the six million tons of stone by placing detectors in a chamber at its base and measuring the amount of cosmic-ray penetration, the theory being that more rays would come through hollow areas. The recorders ran twenty-four hours a day for more than a year until, in early 1969, the latest, IBM 1130, computer was delivered to the university for analysis of the tapes. Six months later the scientists had to admit defeat: the pyramid made no sense at all. Tapes recorded with the same equipment from the same point on successive days showed totally different cosmic-ray patterns. The leader of the project, Amr Gohed, in an interview afterward said, 'This is scientifically impossible. Call it what you will - occultism, the curse of the pharaohs, sorcery, or magic, there is some force that defies the laws of science at work in the pyramid.'

The idea of shape having an influence on the functions taking place within it is not a new one. A French firm once patented a special container for making yogurt, because that particular shape enhanced the action of the micro-organism involved in the process. The brewers of a Czechoslovakian beer tried to change from round to angular barrels but found that this resulted in a deterioration in the quality of their beer despite the fact that the method of processing remained unchanged. A German researcher has shown that mice with identical wounds heal more quickly if they are kept in spherical cages. Architects in Canada report a sudden improvement in schizophrenic patients living in trapezoidal hospital wards.

It is possible that all shapes have their own qualities and that the forms we see around us are the result of combinations of environmental frequencies. In the eighteenth century the German physicist Ernst Chladni discovered a way of making vibration patterns visible. He mounted a thin metal plate on a violin, scattered sand on the plate, and found that when a bow was drawn across the strings, the sand arranged itself into beautiful patterns.

These arrangements, now known as Chladni's figures, develop because the sand ends up only on those parts of the plate where there is no vibration. They have been extensively used in physics to emonstrate wave function, but they also show very well that different frequencies produce patterns with different forms. By juggling around with powders of different densities and by playing notes with a wide range of frequencies, it is possible to induce a pattern to take on almost any form. It is interesting, and perhaps significant, that Chladni's figures most often adopt familiar organic forms. Concentric circles, such as the annual rings in a tree trunk; alternating lines, such as the stripes on a zebra's back; hexagonal grids, such as the cells in a honeycomb; radiating wheel spokes, such as the canals in a jellyfish; vanishing spirals, such as the turrets of shellfish - all these commonly occur. The study of this phenomenon, the effect of waves on matter, is called cymatics. (166)

The basic principle of cymatics is that environmental pressures are brought to bear in wave patterns and that matter responds to these pressures by taking a form that depends on the frequency of the waves. There are a limited number of frequencies involved, and nature tends to respond to these in predictable ways, by repeating a limited number of functional forms. The helical pattern of an updraft of heated air (a thermal) is mirrored in the growth of a creeper twined around a tree and in the arrangement of the atoms in a molecule of DNA. The manta ray flows through tropical waters with muscular waves that run in trains across its broad, flat back like wind-blown patterns on the surface of the sea.

Mollusks without shells and flatworms that live in water move in exactly the same way. Given the same problem, nature will usually find the same solution. It could not do this with such widely divergent raw materials unless they were responding to identical pressures. There is even an example of convergent evolution at a molecular level in two enzymes, one from soil bacteria and the other from man, which have exactly the same pattern of amino acids at the 'business ends'. (184)

The recurrence of a small basic repertoire of shapes cannot be accidental. There are many variations on the chosen themes, but these are usually a compromise between the environmental pressures and individual needs. The embryonic material of most reptiles, for instance, is enclosed in one of the standard packages, a perfect sphere, because this is the shape that combines maximum volume with minimum surface area and use of materials. Crocodiles and turtles produce round eggs with thin elastic shells that have to be buried in moist soil to prevent their drying out. Birds, however, have gone an evolutionary stage further and become relatively independent of the ground and more concerned with parental care.

They keep their eggs in the air, and to prevent desiccation, have developed a harder, less porous shell. But this raises a new problem. The brittle, non-elastic package is more likely to break under the pressure of gravity, so the eggs of nearly all birds are now spheres that have become rather pointed. They have been distorted in the one way that could give them the greatest possible mechanical strength without internal modifications of any kind. The basic shape was determined by environmental pressures and modified to meet specific needs.

In Switzerland during the past ten years Hans Jenny has been refining Chladni's figures and producing elegant proof that form is a function of frequency. One of his inventions is a 'tonoscope', which converts sounds into visible three-dimensional patterns in inert material. (167) This can be used with the human voice as the sound source, and when someone speaks the sound for the letter 0 into the microphone, it produces a perfectly spherical pattern. The sphere is one of nature's basic forms, but it is startling to discover that the shape produced by the frequency of the 0 sound is exactly the shape we have chosen to represent it pictorially in our script.

It raises specters of ancient beliefs that words and names had properties of their own. Today we still tend to regard personal names as something special, and find that children are often anxious to conceal theirs. Young children in particular always demand to know what the name of a thing is, never questioning that it has one, and regard this as a valuable acquisition. Is it possible that words have a power by virtue of their own special frequencies? Can magic words and sacred formulas and chants in fact exert an influence that differs from other sounds chosen at random? It seems so, and with Jenny's discovery of word patterns, I find myself looking with some discomfort and awe at St John's assertion, 'In the beginning was the Word.'

As a biologist, I would have to paraphrase it as 'In the beginning was the Sound of the Word,' because there is an enormous national and individual variation in the speech sounds used to portray the same written word. (242) The International Phonetic Alphabet overcomes this difficulty by providing symbols to represent every shade of sound in most human languages. Analysing this alphabet, one can see certain basic patterns. A speech sound is produced by allowing air to resonate in the throat, mouth, and nasal chambers, while subjecting it to some sort of modification by uvula, palate, tongue, teeth, or lips. There are two basic kinds of sound - vowels, which are produced without friction or stoppage, and consonants, which are characterised by friction, squeezing, or stoppage of the breath in some part of the passage. Vowel sounds are always accompanied by vibration of the vocal cords and have far more power than the largely unvoiced consonants. The power of vowels ranges from nine to forty-seven microwatts, while consonants seldom reach two microwatts, so the vowels carry further and are more easily received.

Resonance in the fluid of man's ear makes the vowel sounds ah, aw, eh, ee, and oo, in that order, the easiest of all speech sounds to hear. (The vowels in Swahili, which is a lingua franca for over two hundred tribes in East Africa, are pronounced exactly like this.) Consonants, on the other hand, are often explosive, as when the air is released suddenly from behind an obstruction as in a 'p' sound, or else they are fricative, as when air escapes gradually, as in the formation of an V sound. These produce little power, but they have much higher frequencies than the vowel sounds. When calling a cat, which is an animal designed to respond to the high-frequency sounds of its prey, people of all languages use combinations of these two short-wave consonants.

So the sounds of words do have different physical properties. If resonance can be produced between an air column in a sender's throat and another in a receiver's ear, then similar transfers of energy can take place between the throat and other parts of the environment. When Joshua's people 'shouted with a great shout', the walls of Jericho fell down. The sudden loud cry of a samurai swordsman breaks the nerve of an adversary, and the trill of a soprano shatters glass. These are sustained effects, much like the burning heat of the midday sun, but we know that life responds to things as subtle as the moon filtered through twenty feet of water, so it is not unreasonable to assume that living matter is sensitive in different ways to the equally subtle frequency changes and patterns in human speech.

Linguists have not solved the problems of the origins of speech. There are many ideas, some with picturesque names, such as the 'bow wow' theory, which holds that language arose in imitation of sounds that occur in nature, or the 'yo he ho' theory, to the effect that it came from grunts of physical exertion. But there does not seem to have been any concerted attempt to look for biological origins among the basic sounds in the phonetic alphabet. Jenny's demonstration that the 'oh' sound has a spherical shape is dramatic, but it should not come as a surprise. It feels right.

Music provides another example of waves spaced in a meaningful manner. Donald Andrews has incorporated harmonic motion into a complex theory of the universe that he calls the 'symphony of life'. In this system atoms provide the musical notes, each one vibrating like a spherical bell. Molecules are chords composed of orderly patterns of these notes, and the music is played on instruments whose shape is provided by the organism itself. Andrews showed that even a violin lying still on a table is always humming gently to itself, and he believes this to be true of all matter. Certainly muscles under tension produce an audible sound. In one imaginative experiment, Andrews went around Baltimore Museum tapping bronze and marble statues with a hammer and recording the sounds on a high-speed tape in the hope of capturing the essential vibrations characteristic of their shapes. He did in fact find that identical shapes in the size ratio of two to one produced the same fundamental tone but an octave apart. This is exactly the effect one gets by halving the length of a violin string, and it suggests that three-dimensional objects could operate on the same basic musical principles.

The cosmos is full of 'noise', irregular jumbles of wavelengths, but all its useful signals are regular patterns. Combinations of musical notes chosen at random jar on our nerves; we find them unpleasant. But tones with certain regular intervals between them are harmonious; we find them pleasing. A note played together with another one that has exactly double its frequency, that is, one octave higher, makes a very harmonious sound. Three notes go well together as a chord if their relative frequencies are in the proportion of 4:5:6. These are purely mathematical relationships, but we know from experience that these are the ones to which man responds. Music is being played to other animals on farms and in zoos with similarly marked effects. Preferences differ from species to species, presumably because their structure and sensitivity, and therefore their resonant frequencies, differ.

Research is now going on into the effect of music on plants. It has been discovered that geraniums grow faster and taller to the accompaniment of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. If the dominant frequencies in these pieces of music are broadcast to the plants, they have some effect, but growth is more marked if the frequencies occur in the spatial relationship so carefully designed by the composer. Bacteria are affected in the same way, multiplying under the influence of certain frequencies and dying when subject to others. It is not a long step from this discovery to the old idea that frequent repetition of certain chants or songs could cure disease.

There are other spatial relationships that have an effect on us. Artists have known for centuries that certain proportions are more pleasing than others. If people are presented with a large number of four-sided shapes ranging from a square to a very long, thin rectangle, most of them will choose a shape whose length is a little more than one and one half times its height. (33) This shape, which the majority of people find to be the most pleasing, is called the Golden Mean; its exact dimensions have been established as a ratio of 1 to 1.618. There are enormous differences between the traditional arts of different peoples, but it seems that aesthetic tastes in all are governed by similar basic laws. (98)

A study in London found cross-cultural color and design similarities in large-scale tests with British and Japanese students. Our response to proportions is presumably governed by the common distance between our eyes. A man who had been blind in one eye from birth and never known binocular vision, would probably find a square more pleasing. We know that people with only one eye have an unequal development of one half of the brain and that this is reflected in their brain waves. Having different rhythms, they respond to different frequencies.

Following discoveries about the nature of light, magnetism, and electricity in the nineteenth century, the theory of a 'vibrating universe' became very popular in occult circles, but it was Pythagoras, in the fifth century BC, who first developed the idea. The notion that all the universe is connected in a grand design has always been fundamental to magic, and the Pythagoreans used the mathematical relationship of musical intervals to express this pattern numerically.

They were the first professional numerologists. Devotees of number systems point to the seven colors in the rainbow, the seven days in the week, the seven seals of Christendom, the seven Devas of Hinduism, the seven Amsha-Spands of Persian faith, and so on, claiming occult properties for this and other special numbers. Goethe was obsessed with three, Swoboda swore by twenty-three, and Freud believed in periods of twenty-seven. It is difficult to see biological significance in any of these intervals, and tempting to dismiss the whole idea on the grounds that any number is as likely as any other, but it seems that this is not true.

An American mathematician noticed that the earlier pages in books of logarithms kept in his university library were dirtier than later ones, indicating that science students, for some reason, had more occasion to calculate with numbers beginning with 1 than with any other number. (261) He made a collection of tables and calculated the relative frequency of each digit from 1 to 9. Theoretically they should occur equally often, but he found that 30 per cent of the numbers were 1, whereas 9 only occupied 5 per cent of the space. These are almost exactly the proportions given to these numbers on the scale of a slide rule, so the designers of that instrument clearly recognised that such a bias existed.

This preponderance of the number 1 may have been caused by the fact that the tables were not really random, but bigger tables provide a similar bias. The ecologist Lament Cole worked with a Rand Corporation publication that gives a million random digits. (262) He selected numbers at regular intervals to represent the level of metabolic activity of a unicorn at the end of each hour over a long period. There should have been no relationship between the numbers and no kind of cyclic pattern, but Cole is now credited with the shattering zoological discovery that unicorns are busiest at three o'clock in the morning. (77)

It is possible that these discrepancies may be due to some peculiarity in our way of counting, but it looks as though the bias follows a natural law. Nature seems to count exponentially. Not 1 2 3 4 5, but 1 2 4 8 16, the numbers growing by a logarithmic power each time. Population increases in this way, and, even at an individual level, things such as the strength of a stimulus and the level of response to it vary in an exponential way. This is, however, nothing more than an observation; it does not explain the anomalous way in which numbers behave.

The unexpected grouping of similar numbers is something like the unusual grouping of circumstances that we call coincidence. Everyone has had the experience of coming across a new word or name for the first time and then seeing it in a dozen different places in quick succession. Or of finding oneself in a small group of people, three of whom have the same birthdays. Often these coincidences come in clusters: some days are particularly lucky, while on others it is just one damn' thing after another. Several people have made it part of their life's work to collect information on coincidences of this kind.

The biologist Kammerer was one, and it was he who gave the phenomenon the name of seriality. He defines a series as 'a lawful occurrence of the same or similar things or events ... which are not connected by the same active cause' and claims that coincidence is in reality the work of a natural principle. (171) Kammerer spent days just sitting in public places noting down the number of people passing, the way they dressed, what they carried, and so on. When he analysed these records, he found that there were typical clusters of things that occurred together and then disappeared altogether. This kind of wave pattern in events is familiar to all stockbrokers and gamblers, and every insurance company runs its entire business of assessment on similar tables of probability.

These 'coincidental' clusters are a real phenomenon. Kammerer explains them by his Law of Seriality, which says that working in opposition to the second law of thermodynamics is a force that tends towards symmetry and coherence by bringing like and like together. In a strange, illogical way, this idea is rather persuasive, but there is no good scientific evidence to support it and the theory is not very important to us here. It is enough to know that there is a discernible organisation of events. Taken together with musical and artistic harmony, with the non-randomness of numbers, and with the periodicity of planetary movements, we begin to get a picture of an environment in which there are recognisable patterns. Superimposed on the cosmic chaos are rhythms and harmonies that control many aspects of life on earth by a communication of energy made possible by the shape of things here and their resonance in sympathy with cosmic themes.

Biophysics

We are all sensitive to the physical forces around us, and it seems that there are ways of enhancing this sensitivity. One has been in use for at least five thousand years. Bas-reliefs from early Egypt show figures in strange headgear carrying, at arm's length in front of them, a forked stick; and Emperor Kwang Su of China is depicted in a statue dated 2200 BC carrying an identical object. Both, it seems, were in search of water.

Many animals have an extraordinary sensitivity to water, and some, such as the elephant, succeed in finding it underground. In times of drought, elephants often perform vital community services by using their tusks and pile-driving feet to expose hidden water sources. It is possible that they can smell the water percolating through the soil or that they have come to have a fairly elementary knowledge of geology, always digging at the lowest point on the outside curve of a dry river bed, where water is most likely to collect. But there are instances in which neither of these solutions is tenable, and we are left with the possibility that there are ways of enhancing this sensitivity. One has been earth, two thirds of most animals is water.

One of the preconditions for resonance is that there should be similar, or at least compatible, structures in sender and receiver, so if the energy is broadcast by a water source, it could probably find a response in the body of most mammals. Our brains are 80 per cent water, which makes them even more liquid than blood, so the resonance might take place there, but the response seems to be most manifest in the long muscles of our bodies.

The classical method of water divining, or dowsing, is to cut a forked twig from a shade tree such as willow, hazel, or peach and hold it out in front of the body parallel to the ground. In this position the muscles of the arm are under some tension; it is claimed that as the dowser approaches water, this tension somehow extends into the twig and induces it to move. The patterns of movement depend very much on the individual. Some say that an upward thrust of the dowsing rod indicates the upstream side of a water flow and the pattern of gyration indicates depth, but others disagree completely.

There is a tremendous variation in technique among dowsers. Instruments in use include metal rods, coat hangers, whalebone, copper wire, walking sticks, pitchforks, bakelite strips, surgical scissors, pendulums, and even, it is said, a German sausage. For each dowsing aid there are many different ways of holding it and interpreting the way it moves. Just one thing takes all this extraordinary pantomime out of the area of sheer farce - the dowsers enjoy a very high rate of success.

Every major water and pipeline company in the United States has a dowser on its payroll. The Canadian Ministry of Agriculture employs a permanent dowser. UNESCO has engaged a Dutch dowser and geologist to pursue official investigations for them. Engineers from the US First and Third Marine divisions in Vietnam have been trained to use dowsing rods to locate booby traps and sunken mortar shells. The Czechoslovakian Army has a permanent corps of dowsers in a special unit. The geology departments of Moscow State and Leningrad universities have launched a full-scale investigation into dowsing - not to find out if it works, but to discover how it works. There is obviously something in it.

Serious research into dowsing seems to have begun in France in 1910. It was largely instigated by the Vicomte Henri de France, who published Le Sourcier Moderne and was, in 1933, partly responsible also for the formation of the British Society of Dowsers. Research in both countries is summarised in two books, The Divining Rod (16) and The Physics of the Divining Rod (204), which are interesting but clearly show the limitations of small-scale private projects. The fact that these are conducted without proper supervision and are poorly reported allows most Western scientists to dismiss the subject altogether, but in Russia research into dowsing now enjoys state backing, and it is there that the biggest advances are being made.

These researches began when an official commission appointed well-known geologists and hydrologists to work in conjunction with dowsers from the Red Army. After thousands of tests the commission reported that forked twigs responded, both to underground sources of water and to electrical cables with a force that was measured as high as 1,000 gram centimeters. They found that no matter how quickly a dowser walked, or how carefully he was screened with steel plates or lead armor, the rods still responded. The report also mentions that the twigs were successful for only two or three days, and that a broken one could not be repaired without a loss of sensitivity.

In some of the tests, lead, zinc, and gold were detected at a depth of 240 feet, and the commission concluded that dowsing could be used with striking success to locate underground electrical cables, pipes, damaged points in cable networks, minerals, and water. They suggested that the old Russian name meaning 'wizard rod' be abandoned, and so today research on dowsing carries on under the safe,new, demystified name of 'The Biophysical Effects Method'.

In 1966 a Leningrad mineralogist, Nikolai Sochevanov, directed an expedition to the Kirghiz region, near Russia's border with China. They started with a survey in an airplane equipped with a magnetometer of the kind used by mining companies for aerial prospecting. Inside the plane Sochevanov and several other 'operators' stood with dowsing rods at the ready. Flying over the river Chu, they found that the vast amount of water in the center of the river had no effect, but that all of them could feel pressure on the rods near the shores, on either side.

Tests in other parts of the world have shown similar results, and it seems to be true that water influences man most strongly not where a large mass is moving at great speed but where it is in friction with the soil, particularly where soil surface in contact with the water is large, as it is in ground saturated with water moving slowly through tiny capillaries. Flying over known mineral deposits, Sochevanov experienced marked reactions, and, in follow-up tests on the ground, his team located a seam of lead only three inches thick at a depth of almost five hundred feet.

With larger deposits near the surface, they found that the rods were being jerked right out of their hands, so Sochevanov designed a new, steel instrument that could rotate freely. This is a U shape with roller-bearing handles about two feet apart at the ends and an 8-inch loop twisted into the center of the curve. He claims that the number of turns made by the rod gives an indication of the depth and size of the underground deposit and has engineered an automatic recording device that is attached to the instrument and graphs its behavior. In large-scale tests with hundreds of operators, profiles have been constructed of whole areas of land.

One such survey was made on 21 October 1966 in an area near Alma-Ata where three million cubic meters of rock were to be destroyed by explosives in a development project. The team covered this site just before the explosion and returned immediately afterward to make a second survey. Their rods reported enormous changes in underground patterns, and for four hours following the explosion, the shape of the profile continued to change as they plotted it. Finally it settled down, and when seismographs indicated that the tremors had subsided, the dowsers found that the pattern had returned almost to its preblast configuration. The small differences between the 'before' and the 'after' patterns were later determined by excavation to be due to underground fractures produced by the explosion.

Sochevanov made field tests with dowsers operating inside moving vehicles, with their recording devices linked to the drive shaft. He found that the rods continued to respond, but that at greater speeds they made fewer revolutions. The fact that there was any response at all inside a metal vehicle seems to indicate that the energy involved is not electrical, and any attempt to strengthen incoming signals by attaching long wire aerials to the dowsers' wrists has so far only diminished the response. Powerful magnets strapped on operators' backs had no effect, but leather gloves killed the response altogether. Groups of dowsers linked together had no cumulative effect, but when a seasoned dowser touched the hand of a non-operator, the rod came to life in the novice's hands.

Experiments in all countries suggest that, whatever the dowsing force may be, it cannot work on the rod alone. A living being has to act as a 'middleman'. The Dutch geologist Solco Tromp has shown that dowsers are unusually sensitive to the earth's magnetic field, and respond to changes in the field that can be verified with magnetometers. (323) He has also discovered that a good dowser can detect an artificial field only one two-hundredth the strength of the earth field and that he can use his rod to chart its extent in an experimental room. Dowsers tested in the Laboratoire de Physique in Paris were able to tell whether an electric current was switched on or off simply by walking past a coil at a distance of three feet with their dowsing rod held at the ready. (279)

At the University of Halle it has been discovered that dowsers show an increase in blood pressure and pulse rate in some fields. (233) The Soviet scientists divide all people into four basic groups according to the way the dowsing rod 'sees' them. The rod is attached to the first group which includes all women (who have a 40 per cent higher success rate in dowsing than men). Group two consists of men who repulse the rod completely, while those in the last two groups repel the rod from shoulders and waist respectively. Polarity maps of the human body, prepared with an electrocardiograph by Tromp, support this grouping.

Dowsing fields, areas in which dowsers get strong responses, have been confirmed with proton magnetometers sensitive enough to measure the magnetic field in an atom. Experiments with these naturally occurring fields have produced interesting results. Mice placed in a long enclosure half on and half off a dowsing zone refused to sleep inside the field. (323) Cucumbers, celery, onions, maize, privet hedges, and ash trees will hardly grow at all if planted in the ground above a dowsing zone. It is said that ants always build their nests directly in a zone and that bees swarm on branches above such a field. It has also been suggested that rheumatics experience muscular contractions and pain in the joints in a field produced by water, and that strong dowsing zones of any kind have a bad effect on human health.

The dowsing literature is full of incidents involving 'noxious rays' and 'harmful radiation' that can be minimised by moving a chair or bed from the afflicted zone or by planting complex coils of copper wire inside the field to 'neutralise' it. It is very difficult to judge these reports objectively and to know how big a part suggestion played in the alleged cures, but the fact remains that an electrocardiogram attached even to the body of a non-dowser registers a difference in potential when the person moves into a dowsing zone.

The literature also abounds with accounts of dowsers locating missing persons, criminals, and dead bodies by following the indications of a 'sensitised' rod. This is usually a pendulum with a hollow bob containing something belonging to the person being sought, or one that has been 'tuned' by holding it over a sample object to find out how long the thread needs to be to produce the right reaction. There have been many celebrated and well-publicised successes with this technique, the most impressive being those in which the dowser locates his prey by working not in the field but over a large-scale map of unfamiliar territory.

As far as it is possible to judge, from records that are seldom scientific, of events that by their very nature are unrepeatable, the method works. Knowing something of the influence of shape on frequency, it is possible to speculate that the two-dimensional shapes on maps or photographs might have some properties similar to real objects, but the mind boggles at the idea.

This technique, of using a pendulum to acquire information not only about an object's location but also of its character, has become known as 'radiesthesia' - meaning sensitivity to radiations. It is used, among other things, for sex detection. The Japanese have always been expert in the difficult art of determining the sex of day-old chicks, but now they are able to do it even before the eggs hatch, with the aid of nothing more than a bead on the end of a piece of silk thread.

Eggs pass by the expert on a conveyor belt with their long axes north-south. The bead is held over the line and swings along the same axis if the egg is sterile, gyrates in a clockwise circle for a cock chick, and anti-clockwise for a hen. The factories claim a success rate of 99 per cent for this system. There are practitioners in England who apparently can sex humans in the same way when provided only with a drop of blood or saliva on a piece of blotting paper. (20) They have been used several times to assist police forensic laboratories in murder investigations.

It is very easy to say, as dowsers do, 'All matter gives off a ray, and the human body, acting in much the same way as the receiver of a wireless set, picks it up.' (322) But glib statements like this tell absolutely nothing about the process or the biology involved. The sum total of hard knowledge about dowsing seems to amount to this: Water, by the action of friction between itself and the soil, creates a field that could have electromagnetic properties. Rubber and leather insulate this field, but metals seem to have no effect. Metals themselves, perhaps by their position in the earth's magnetic field, also exert a field effect. The fields created or modified by inorganic objects are appreciable to some animals and people. An unconscious sensitivity to these fields can be made manifest by using an object such as a rod or a pendulum as a visible indicator of field strength and direction.

Man has used dowsing techniques for such a long time that we may find animals that can do the same thing. Antelope and wild pigs have curved horns and tusks, which are similar in shape to the traditional forked twig, and both these species are very successful in finding hidden water sources. Could it be that their built-in dowsing rods help in some way? The best human dowsers can work with their bare hands, so it is possible that even animals without antennas can navigate in this way. As far as I know, no student of bird migration has ever considered this possibility. If the willow twig works in man's hands, how does it function when attached to the tree? The roots of trees are positively geotropic - they grow directly toward the source of gravity - but they also seek out sources of water. Perhaps they do this by dowsing?

The discovery that animals are sensitive to the dowsing field and react strongly to it will not surprise anyone who has ever watched a wild mammal settling down to sleep. The choice of a resting place naturally has to be made very carefully with regard to warmth and shelter and safety from predators, but often an animal will choose a place that seems to be far less appealing on these grounds than another only a short distance away. Domestic dogs and cats show the same behavior, and their owners know full well that it is no good making this decision on the pet's behalf - they have to wait until the animal chooses its own place and then put the sleeping basket there.

There are some places on which an animal will not lie on any account. That humans have similar abilities has been shown by Carlos Castaneda in a recent book on Yaqui beliefs that is the most vivid and exciting piece of ethnography I have ever read. (67) The sorcerer Don Juan has told Castaneda that there is one spot on the porch of his house that is unique, where he can feel happy and strong, and that he must find it for himself. Castaneda tries for hours, sitting everywhere in turn and even rolling around on the floor, but nothing happens until he focuses his eyes on a spot directly in front of him, and the whole world out of the corners of his eyes turns greenish yellow.

Then, '... suddenly, at a point near the middle of the floor, I became aware of another change in hue. At a place to my right, still in the periphery of my field of vision, the greenish yellow became intensely purple. I concentrated my attention on it. The purple faded into a pale, but still brilliant, color which remained steady for the time I kept my attention on it.' He decided to lie down on this spot, but 'I felt an unusual apprehension. It was more like a physical sensation of something pushing on my stomach. I jumped up and retreated in one movement. The hair on my neck pricked up. My legs had arched slightly, my trunk was bent forward, and my arms stuck out in front of me rigidly with my fingers contracted like a claw. I took notice of my strange posture and my fright increased. I walked back involuntarily and ... slumped to the floor.' He had found his spot.

In 1963 a 12-year-old South African named Pieter van Jaarsveld became world famous as 'the boy with X-ray eyes' for his ability to detect water hidden deep underground. He used no sort of dowsing rod but claimed to be able to see water 'shimmering like green moonlight' through the surface of the soil. Pieter was very surprised to learn that other people could not see it equally well. I think that soon, as we begin to realise that nature and the classic five senses are only a small part of the real magic of Supernature, more of us might begin to join him in seeing things as they really are.

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