p. 107).  But the most singular parallel to the performance of the African wizard must be quoted from a curious pamphlet already referred to, a translation of the old French ‘Verge de Jacob,’ written, annotated, and published by a Mr. Thomas Welton.  Mr. Welton seems to have been a believer in mesmerism, animal magnetism, and similar doctrines, but the coincidence of his story with that of the African sorcerer is none the less remarkable.  It is a coincidence which must almost certainly be ‘undesigned.’  Mr. Welton’s wife was what modern occult philosophers call a ‘Sensitive.’  In 1851, he wished her to try an experiment with the rod in a garden, and sent a maid-servant to bring ’a certain stick that stood behind the parlour door.  In great terror she brought it to the garden, her hand firmly clutched on the stick, nor could she let it go . . . ’ The stick was given to Mrs. Welton, ’and it drew her with very considerable force to nearly the centre of the garden, to a bed of poppies, where she stopped.’  Here water was found, and the gardener, who had given up his lease as there was 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