Denton, Professor William

Denton, Professor William (1823–1883)

Born in Darlington, England, in January 1823, William Denton was Professor of Geology in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1849, he learned of Dr. J. Rhodes Buchanan’s work in psychometry and met with Buchanan. Denton began his own experiments using geological samples. He found that his sister, Mrs. Anna Denton Cridge, was an excellent psychometrist, as was his wife Elizabeth. On one occasion he gave his wife a specimen to hold from a carboniferous formation. She closed her eyes and immediately began to describe swamps, trees with tufted heads and scaled trunks, and great frog-like creatures that lived in that age. He then gave her lava from a Hawaiian volcanic eruption. She held it and described a “boiling ocean; a cataract of golden lava.”

Denton’s mother was a skeptic with no belief in psychometry. He gave her a meteorite to hold and she said, “I seem to be traveling away; away through nothing—I see what looks like stars and mist.” His wife gave a similar description, adding that she saw a revolving tail of sparks.

Denton authored a number of books including The Soul of Time (1863) and Our Planet; Its Past and Future (1869).

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