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 difficulty proposed by Charles II. In 1679 De Saint
Remain, deserting the old hypothesis of secret 'sympathies,' explained
the motion of the rod (supposing it to move) by the action of
corpuscules. From this time the question became the playing ground of
the Cartesian and other philosophers. The struggle was between theories
of 'atoms,' magnetism, 'corpuscules,' electric effluvia, and so forth, on
one side, and the immediate action of devils or of conscious imposture,
on the other. The controversy, comparatively simple as long as the rod
only indicated hidden water or minerals, was complicated by the revival
of the savage belief that the wand could 'smell out' moral offences. As
long as the twig turned over material objects, you could imagine
sympathies and 'effluvia' at pleasure. But when the wand twirled over
the scene of a murder, or dragged the expert after the traces of the
culprit, fresh explanations were wanted. Le Brun wrote to Malebranche on
July 8, 1689, to tell him that the wand only turned over what the holder
had the _intention_ of discovering. {190} If he were following a
murderer, the wand good-naturedly refused to distract him by turning over
hidden water. On the other hand, Vallemont says that when a peasant was
using the wand to find water, it turned over a spot in a wood where a
murdered woman was buried, and it conducted the peasant to the murderer's
house. These events seem inconsistent with Le Brun's theory of
_intention_. Malebranche replied, i