IN SEARCH OF TRUTH 137 



of land he feels the fork twist downward at a certain point. He digs 

 there and finds a well of living water. If there is much water the 

 rod turns more vigorously or even turns the other way. Another uses 

 the same rod and finds coal, iron, gas or building stone — whatever he 

 may seek. To do this he has only to attach to the branch of the rod a 

 small fragment of that which he would seek. Thus a dime may 

 be attached if one is seeking for silver, a five-dollar gold piece if one 

 looks for gold. In California where there is no witch-hazel the moun- 

 tain willow serves the purpose best, because there is water in its make 

 up. But even the madrono or the azalea can be used in an emergency. 

 A man once tried to bore for gas on a certain tract of land in southern 

 Indiana. He engaged a soothsayer with a witch-hazel rod. But the 

 wizard, finding the territory too large to be gone over in this way, 

 makes a little rod, parlor size, and taking the map of Vanderburg 

 county, goes over it with the instrument. The result was just as satis- 

 factory. He chooses a point on the map, they bore the well in accord- 

 ance with the rod's directions. Plenty of gas is found, which proves 

 the accuracy of the method. As Lord Bacon once observed ' men mark 

 when they hit, but never when they miss.' Still another man wishes to 

 find the material of which a star is made. He takes a tube of metal 

 with lenses and prisms of glass and turns it toward the star. Speedily, 

 by means of lines and streaks on the prism he has his answer, and the 

 composition of a vast sun, so far away that the light which left it in 

 the days of Cassar has never yet reached us, he describes with confidence. 

 Then he turns his tube on the Pole Star and tells us that it is made 

 of two stars, one a great sun which we can see, and the other a smaller 

 sun which we have never seen and which we can never see. Is all this 

 real? If the spectroscope tells the truth where it speaks in such bold 

 fashion, may we not trust the witch-hazel, too, in its more modest 

 claims ? 



" An astronomer traces the course of a far-off planet and finds that 

 its orbit bends a little from a perfect ellipse. From this fact he con- 

 cludes that another planet must be coming near it to attract it. He 

 goes to work to determine the size of this other planet and the place 

 in which it ought to be. When his calculation is finished the telescope 

 is turned toward this place, and the unseen planet is there. If the 

 mathematician through his instruments be thus sensitive to far-off 

 matter in infinite space, may not the clairvoyant through her sensitile- 

 projectile astral body be equally sensitive to a mass of silver? 



" Once in a trance a finely organized adept or ' medium ' wandered 

 in her astral body through the open belt where the souls of the planets 

 wander at will. While there she heard the comet-shriek, the cry of a 

 lost planet soul, the most terrible sound that rings through the heavenly 

 spaces of the zenith. Is not her testimony to be received with that of 

 the other astronomers? 



