nd no water, on the indications of a rod in the hands of the Prieur
de Dorenic, near Guise. In 1700 a cure, near Toulouse, used the wand
to answer questions, which, like _planchette_, it often answered
wrong. The great _sourcier_, or water-finder, of the eighteenth
century was one Bleton. He declared that the rod was a mere index, and
that physical sensations of the searcher communicated themselves to
the wand. This is the reverse of the African theory, that the stick is
inspired, while the men who hold it are only influenced by the stick.
On the whole, Bleton's idea seems the less absurd, but Bleton himself
often failed when watched with scientific care by the incredulous.
Paramelle, who wrote on methods of discovering wells, in 1856, came to
the conclusion that the wand turns in the hands of certain individuals
of peculiar temperament, and that it is very much a matter of chance
whether there are, or are not, wells in the places where it turns.

On the whole, the evidence for the turning of the wand is a shade
better than that for the magical turning of tables. If there are no
phenomena of this sort at all, it is remarkable that the belief in
them is so widely diffused. But if the phenomena are purely
subjective, owing to the conscious or unconscious action of nervous
patients, then they are precisely of the sort which the cunning
medicine-man observes, and makes his profit out of, even in the
earliest stages of society. Once introduced, these practices never die
out among the conservative and unprogressive class of peasants; and,
every now and then, they attract the curiosity of philosophers, or win
the belief of the credulous among the educated classes. Then comes, as
we have lately seen, a revival of ancient superstition. For it were as
easy to pluck the comet out of the sky by the tail, as to eradicate
superstition from the mind of man.

Perhaps one good word may be said for the divining rod. Considering
the chances it has enjoyed, the rod has done less mischief than might
have been expected. It might very well have become, in Europe, as in
Asia and Africa, a kind of ordeal, or method of searching for and
trying malefactors. Men like Jacques Aymar might have played, on a
larger scale, the part of Hopkins, the witch-finder. Aymar was,
indeed, employed by some young men to point out, by help of the wand,
the houses of ladies who had been more frail than faithful. But at the
end of the seventeenth century in France,