the arms and legs; these increased nearly to convulsions. . . .  According to the native idea, it was the sticks which were possessed primarily, and through them the men, who could hardly hold them.  The sticks whirled and dragged the men round and round like mad, through bush and thorny shrub, and over every obstacle; nothing stopped them; their bodies were torn and bleeding.  At last they came back to the assembly, whirled round again, and rushed down the path to fall panting and exhausted in the hut of one of a chief’s wives.  The sticks, rolling to her very feet, denounced her as a thief.  She denied it; but the medicine-man answered, “The spirit has declared her guilty; the spirit never lies."’ The woman, however, was acquitted, after a proxy trial by ordeal:  a cock, used as her proxy, threw up the muavi, or ordeal-poison.

Here the points to be noted are, first, the violent movement of the sticks, which the men could hardly hold; next, the physical agitation of the men.  The former point is illustrated by the confession of a civil engineer writing in the ‘Times.’  This gentleman had seen the rod successfully used for water; he was asked to try it himself, and he determined that it should not twist in his hands ’if an ocean rolled under his feet.’  Twist it did, however, in spite of all his efforts to hold it, when he came above a concealed spring.  Another example is quoted in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ vol. xxii. p. 374.  A narrator, in whom the editor had ‘implicit confidence,’ mentions how, when a lady held the twig just over a hidden well, ’the twig turned so quick as to snap, breaking near her fingers.’  There seems to be no indiscretion in saying, as the statement has often been printed before, that the lady spoken of in the ‘Quarterly Review’ was Lady Milbanke, mother of the wife of Byron.  Dr. Hutton, the geologist, is quoted as a witness of her success in the search for water with the divining rod.  He says that, in an experiment at Woolwich, ’the twigs twisted themselves off below her fingers, which were considerably indented by so forcibly holding the rods between them.’ {186} Next, the violent excitement of the four young men of the Mauganja is paralleled by the physical experience of the lady quoted in the ‘Quarterly Review.’  ’A degree of agitation was visible in her face when she first made the experiment; she says this agitation was great’ when she began to practise the art, or whatever we are to call it.  Again, in ‘Lettres qui decouvrent l’illusion’ (p. 93), we read that Jacques Aymar (who discovered the Lyons murderer in 1692) se sent tout emu—­feels greatly agitated—­when he comes on that of which he is in search.  On page 97 of the same volume, the body of the man who holds the divining rod is described as ‘violently agitated.’  When Aymar entered the room where the murder, to be described later, was committed, ’his pulse rose as if he were in a burning fever, and the wand turned rapidly in his hands’ (’Lettres,’