de distribution of their favourite mysteries is a proof
that 'there is something in them.' The incredulous look on our modern
'twigs' and turning-tables and ghost stories as mere 'survivals' from
the stage of savage culture, or want of culture, when the fancy of
half-starved man was active and his reason uncritical.

The great authority for the modern history of the divining rod is a
work published by M. Chevreuil, in Paris, in 1854. M. Chevreuil,
probably with truth, regarded the wand as much on a par with the
turning-tables, which, in 1854, attracted a good deal of attention. He
studied the topic historically, and his book, with a few accessible
French tracts and letters of the seventeenth century, must here be our
guide. A good deal of M. Chevreuil's learning, it should be said, is
reproduced in Mr. Baring Gould's _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_,
but the French author is much more exhaustive in his treatment of the
topic. M. Chevreuil could find no earlier book on the twig than the
_Testament du Frere Basil Valentin_, a holy man who flourished (the
twig) about 1413; but whose treatise is possibly apocryphal. According
to Basil Valentin, the twig was regarded with awe by ignorant
labouring men, which is still true. Paracelsus, though he has a
reputation for magical daring, thought the use of the twig 'uncertain
and unlawful'; and Agricola, in his _De Re Metallica_ (1546),
expresses a good deal of scepticism about the use of the rod in
mining. A traveller of 1554 found that the wand was _not_ used--and
this seems to have surprised him--in the mines of Macedonia. Most of
the writers of the sixteenth century accounted for the turning of the
rod by 'sympathy,' which was then as favourite an explanation of
everything as evolution is to-day. In 1630 the Baron de Beau Soleil of
Bohemia (his name sounds rather Bohemian) came to France with his
wife, and made much use of the rod in the search for water and
minerals. The Baroness wrote a little volume on the subject,
afterwards reprinted in a great storehouse of this lore, _La Physique
Occulte_, of Vallemont. Kircher, a Jesuit, made experiments which came
to nothing; but Gaspard Schott, a learned writer, cautiously declined
to say that the Devil was always 'at the bottom of it' when the rod
turned successfully. The problem of the rod was placed before our own
Royal Society by Boyle, in 1666, but the Society was not more
successful here than in dealing with the philosophical