y experiments were made with Aymar in Paris, and that
they were all failures. He fell into every trap that was set for him;
detected thieves who were innocent, failed to detect the guilty, and
invented absurd excuses; alleging, for example, that the rod would not
indicate a murderer who had confessed, or who was drunk when he
committed his crime. These excuses seem to annihilate the wild
contemporary theory of Chauvin and others, that the body of a murderer
naturally exhales an invisible _matiere meurtriere_--peculiar
indestructible atoms, which may be detected by the expert with the
rod. Something like the same theory, we believe, has been used to
explain the pretended phenomena of haunted houses. But the wildest
philosophical credulity is staggered by a _matiere meurtriere_ which
is disengaged by the body of a sober, but not by that of an
intoxicated, murderer, which survives tempests in the air, and endures
for many years, but is dissipated the moment the murderer confesses.
Believers in Aymar have conjectured that his real powers were
destroyed by the excitements of Paris, and that he took to imposture;
but this is an effort of too easy good-nature. When Vallemont defended
Aymar (1693) in the book called _La Physique Occulte_, he declared
that Aymar was physically affected to an unpleasant extent by _matiere
meurtriere_, but was not thus agitated when he used the rod to
discover minerals. We have seen that, if modern evidence can be
trusted, holders of the rod are occasionally much agitated even when
they are only in search of wells. The story gave rise to a prolonged
controversy, and the case remains a judicial puzzle, but little
elucidated by the confession of the hunchback, who may have been
insane, or morbid, or vexed by constant questioning till he was weary
of his life. He was only nineteen years of age.

The next use of the rod was very much like that of 'tipping' and
turning tables. Experts held it (as did Le Pere Menestrier, 1694),
questions were asked, and the wand answered by turning in various
directions. By way of showing the inconsistency of all philosophies of
the wand, it may be said that one girl found that it turned over
concealed gold if she held gold in her hand, while another found that
it indicated the metal so long as she did _not_ carry gold with her in
the quest. In the search for water, ecclesiastics were particularly
fond of using the rod. The Marechal de Boufflers dug many wells, and
fou