Posted by David Brooks on November 19, 2003 at 14:55:49 from 208.210.80.40 user DavidBrooks.
In Reply to: Titty finding water with a forked stick posted by Ed Kiser on November 19, 2003 at 04:50:45:
Dowsing certainly *feels* like it works - long, slender reeds exaggerate tiny muscular motions that we don't even know are occurring and create (I can attest) a mysterious and wonderous sensation.
Alas, many attempts over the years to test dowsing as a method of finding water (or anything else) have fizzled. If you want to wade through charts and data, there's a link below.
Many people think water-dowsing works because large parts of the industrial world are pretty darn wet. (That's why they were settled and fluorished!) I live in New England, and you can dig just about anywhere and eventually hit some sort of water; I bet it's the same in the Lakes Country. You may not hit enough water to be useful, but usually you'll hit something that a dowser can point to as success.
This is not to say a good dowser can't be useful. An experienced water-seeker who has spent year finding places where wells have been dug, and then seeing which were good and which weren't, could easily have compiled knowledge, conscious and unconscious, about above-ground signs that raise the likelihood of below-ground water flows.