ience-stricken Macbeth.
Cannot you contrive some intellectual cookery to make the process of
deglutition easier? Suppose you mix the raw facts with some flowery
hypothesis, throw in a handful of familiar ideas to give a congenial
flavour, and stir into the mess some leaven of stale opinion to make it
rise; so, do try your hand at a philosophical souffle."

_Do manus._

Then you are to imagine that a current of electricity, or of something
like it, may use your legs as conductors, as you walk over the soil from
which it emanates, the circuit which it seeks being completed through
your arms and the divining rod.

Nothing, then, would be more likely, upon analogy,--the extreme part of
the current traversing a _curved_ and movable conductor,--than that the
latter should be attracted or repelled, or both alternately, by or from
the soil below, or by your person, or both.

And see, what would render such an explanation plausible? Why, the
cessation of the rotatory motion of the divining fork, on the operator
simultaneously holding in his hands a _straight_ rod of the same
substance,--that is, conjointly with the other,--offering a shorter road
to the journeying fluid, and so superseding the movable one. Well, the
Count de Tristan did this, and the result was conformable to the
hypothesis. When he walked over the exciting soil, with two rods held in
his two hands, the one a hazel fork, the other a straight hazel twig, no
motion whatever manifested itself in the former.

I flatter myself, that if you now continue to disbelieve, the fault is
not mine: the fault must lie in your organisation. You must have a very
small bump of credulity, and a very large bump of incredulity. You must
be, actively and passively, incapable of receiving new ideas. How on
earth did you get your old ones?--They must come by entail. But you are
still a disbeliever?

Bless me! how am I to proceed? I catch at the slenderest straw of
analogical suggestion. I have heard that the best cure, when you have
burned your finger, is to hold it to the fire. Let me try a
corresponding proceeding with you. My first statement has sadly
irritated and blistered your belief; oblige me by trying the soothing
application of the following fact:--

Although, in general, the divining rod behaves with great gravity and
consistency, and looks contemplatively upward, when it comes upon
grounds that move it, and then twirls respectably round, as you might
twirl your thu