My dear Mrs. Fisher,—­I have much pleasure in signing your application for the Psychical Research Society, though the majority of the active members are so absurdly and illogically sceptical that you will not find much instruction in their sayings.  Mr. Podmore’s report in the last-issued Proceedings is a good illustration....

We have all been in Switzerland this year.  Violet, her mother, and five lady friends all went together to a rather newly-discovered place, Adelboden, a branch valley from that going up to the Gemmi Pass by Kandersteg.  I went first for a week to Davos, to give a lecture to Dr. Lunn’s party, and enjoyed myself much, chiefly owing to the company of Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, one of the most witty, earnest, advanced, and estimable men I have ever met.  Dr. Lunn himself is very jolly, and we had also Mr. Le Gallienne, the poet and critic, and between them we had a very brilliant table-talk.  Mr. Haweis was also there, and one afternoon he and I talked for two hours about Spiritualism.  He is a thorough spiritualist, and preaches it....—­Yours very sincerely,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.  TO MRS. FISHER

Parkstone, Dorset.  April 9, 1897.

My dear Mrs. Fisher,—­I have tried several Reincarnation 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 Research Society.  I liked Oliver Lodge’s address to the Spiritualists’ Association better....—­Yours very sincerely,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

* * * * *

In 1891, at the urgent request of Prof.  H. Sidgwick, President of the Society for Psychical Research, 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 investigation for six years before venturing to publish his first report, which appeared in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Part xxxii., 1897.  This was followed by a second report published some years later, in which 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 considerable severity, and some erroneous statements were made, to which Prof.  Barrett replied.  The editor, Sir Norman Lockyer, at first declined to publish Prof.  Barrett’s reply, and to this Wallace refers in the following letter.