Folk-Lore of West and Mid-WalesDavies, Jonathan Ceredig
History
Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales
Davies, Jonathan Ceredig
Folklore -- Wales; Wales -- Social life and customs
The second letter is as follows:--
"I have no time to answer your objection against 'knockers'; I have
a large treatise collected on that head, and what Mr. Derham says is
nothing to the purpose. If sounds of voices, whispers, blasts, working,
or pumping, can be carried on a mile underground, they should always
be heard in the same place, and under the same advantages, and not
once in a month, a year, or two years. Just before the discovery of
ore last week, three men together in our work at "Llwyn Llwyd" were
ear-witnesses of "knockers," pumping, driving a wheelbarrow, etc.;
but there is no pump in the work, nor any mine within less than a
mile of it, in which there are pumps constantly going. If they were
these pumps that they heard, why were they never heard but that once
in the space of a year? And why are they not now heard? But the pumps
make so little noise that they cannot be heard in the other end of
"Esgair y Mwyn" mine when they are at work. We have a dumb and deaf
tailor in the neighbourhood who has a particular language of his
own by signs, and by practice I can understand him and make him
understand me pretty well, and I am sure I could make him learn to
write, and be understood by letters very soon, for he can distinguish
men already by the letters of their names. Now letters are marks to
convey ideas, just after the same manner as the motion of fingers,
hands, eyes, etc. If this man had really seen ore in the bottom of
a sink of water in a mine and wanted to tell me how to come at it,
he would take two sticks like a pump, and would make the motions of a
pumper at the very sink where he knew the ore was, and would make the
motions of driving a wheelbarrow. And what I should infer from thence
would be that I ought to take out the water and sink or drive in the
place, and wheel the stuff out. By parity of reasoning, the language
of "knockers," by imitating the sound of pumping, wheeling, etc.,
signifies that we should take out the water and drive there. This is
the opinion of all old miners, who pretend to understand the language
of the "knockers." Our agent and manager, upon the strength of this
notice, goes on and expect great things. You, and everybody that is
not convinced of the being of "knockers," will laugh at these things,
for they sound like dreams; so does every dark science. Can you make
any illiterate man believe that it is possible to know the distance
of two places by looking at them? Human knowledge is but of small
extent, its bounds are within our view, we see nothing beyond these;
the great universal creation contains powers, etc., that we cannot
so much as guess at. May there not exist beings, and vast powers
infinitely smaller than the particles of air, to whom air is as hard
a body as the diamond is to us? Why not? There is neither great nor
small, but by comparison. Our "knockers" are some of these powers,
the guardians of mines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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