William Denton (geologist)

William Denton (8 January 1823 - 26 August 1883[1]) was a self-taught geologist, author, preacher, and promoter of the occult practice of psychometry.

A Baptist teacher, William Shotton, made an impression on him, by demonstrating a home-made galvanic cell.

At the age of fourteen he received workshop skills as an apprentice to Timothy Hackworth the pioneering railway and marine engineer at his Soho Works in Shildon.

Around the same time, he read Lyell's geology and examined fossils in the workings of the Prince of Wales Tunnel, then being dug to allow a railway to pass beneath the market town of Shildon.

When Hackworth asked his apprentice to repair equipment at a brewery, Denton refused claiming that its connection to alcohol made such work against his conscience.

Later Elizabeth published Annie Denton Cridge's groundbreaking utopian feminist novel, Man's Rights.

[3] Denton read the writings of Joseph Rodes Buchanan on mesmerism, spiritualism, and the idea of psychometry ("measuring the soul").

Denton authored books on his psychometric studies -- The Soul of Things (1863) and Our Planet, Its Past and Future (1869).

[2] In 1881 he toured the United States and Australia, accompanied by his sons Shelley and Sherman who made an extensive collection of natural history specimens along the route.