s no well in the garden,
had the lease renewed.

We have thus evidence to show (and much more might be adduced) that the
belief in the divining rod, or in analogous instruments, is not confined
to the European races. The superstition, or whatever we are to call it,
produces the same effects of physical agitation, and the use of the rod
is accompanied with similar phenomena among Mongols, English people,
Frenchmen, and the natives of Central Africa. The same coincidences are
found in almost all superstitious practices, and in the effects of these
practices on believers. The Chinese use a form of planchette, which is
half a divining rod--a branch of the peach tree; and 'spiritualism' is
more than three-quarters of the religion of most savage tribes, a Maori
seance being more impressive than anything the civilised Sludge can offer
his credulous patrons. From these facts different people draw different
inferences. Believers say that the wide 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