70 THE AMERICAN HOTANIST. 



for instance, the peach tree, the ahnond, even the golden- 

 rod, besides the apple twigs which Dr. Bailey mentions. 

 All these, however, have been considered equally efficacious 

 in detecting lodes of ore in metalliferous districts and 

 hidden gold. 



The curious will find much to interest them on this 

 subject in Mr. T. F. Thiselton-Dyer's volume on "The 

 Folk-lore of Plants." I have myself within a few years 

 seen in an English periodical the advertisement ofa water- 

 hunter employing a divining rod, though I cannot at the 

 moment recall whether or not he mentioned it as being of 

 hazel. 



The etymology of the term "witch hazel" seems to 

 work out as follows: In England there is a species of elm 

 {Ulmus montana) the wood ot which used to be employed 

 in the manufacture ofa sort of chest called a "wych"; 

 whence the tree was called v^ycli elm. As the leaf some- 

 what resembles that of the hazel, the innate propensity 

 of human nature to go wrong asserted itself, and the tree 

 came to be spoken of the "wvch hazel." Then in process 

 of time as the word "wych" lost currency in popular 

 speech, writers put the expression down as "witch hazel," 

 and so it stands now. How the term came to be trans- 

 ferred to our Hamamelis virginica can only be surmised. 

 We know, however, that pioneer folk are not as a rule 

 botanists, and in a new country plants are to a great 

 extent named by the common people from their resem- 

 blance to the plants they left in the fields and gardens of 

 their mother country. 



Philadelphia, Pa. 



[Still another derivation of the name witch hazel may 

 be found in Friend's "Flowers and Flower-lore" where it 

 is said to come from the Anglo-Saxon wic-en meaning to 

 bend and to have reference to the pliant nature of the 

 wood. That the world in general still places considerable 

 faith in the efficiency of the divining rod is shown by the 

 fact that the columns of publications designed for circula- 

 tion among the more ignorant classes still contain numer- 



