RADIO-AESTHETICS

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 January 1938, Page 12

RADIO-AESTHETICS

STRANGE POWER OP ABBE

The recent death of Abbe. Merrnet

removes yet another of those Catholic priests who, like Mendel, may be remembered rather for their services to science than for t heir' eminence in the Church, says a writer in the “Daily Mail."

The Abbe Mermet practised and developed more than fifty years a system of radio-aesthetics concerning which there is still some doubt. The Abbe himself always strenuously denied that his own personality had anything to do with his remarkable achievements in radio-aesthetics, 'and maintained to tho last that he was as much a scientist as any student of chemical reactions.

Like many of those whose life-work has lain in French Switzerland, the Abbe Mermet was a Frenchman, having been born near Annecy seventyone years ago. But the whole of his working life was spent in Switzerland, and throughout all his experience in the strange science which he did so, much to develop he remained a simple, hard-working priest. The Abbe’s radio-aesthetics sprang from his interest in the age-old practice of water-divining. In 1883 there was a terrible drought in Western Switzerland, and the Abbe did great service to his parishioners of the moment in discovering hidden streams for them by means of a “pendulum” which he had invented, and which he spent a large part of the rest of his life in perfecting. The remarkable feature of Abbe Mermet’s early “divinations” was their accuracy. Time and again the depth at which he announced that water would be found was correct, and so were his predictions about the flow per minute of the water. Some of his successes in the sphere of water-divin-ing have passed into legend in Switzerland.

The Abbe’s “pendulum” method has also been applied with success to the discovery of petrol, and even in the search for objects of persons who have disappeared. There is one story of his having found the body of a child who had been carried off by an eagle in the Valais mountains. In the matter of disappearances, however, his method was. not, always successful. Thus he failed when called in over the “Prince” affair. Those who saw him at work said that the instrument seemed to come alive in his hands, and there must remain some doubt whether anyone but the Abbe could have divined water merely by using his “pendulum’’ over a large-scale map. t But the Abbe’s own successes remain.