WATER DIVINING GEEGORY 347 



results in a forthcoming examination. The divining rod will do the 

 feats of the planchette, the spiritualistic medium, and the thought 

 reader. 



Many of the records of the success of diviners are as surprising and 

 as inexplicable from the information given as the performances of a 

 skilled conjuror, and as card tricks, and are as apparently convinc- 

 ing as many spiritualists found the feats of the Georgia INIagnet and 

 of some thought readers until more astute observers discovered the 

 tricks. The widespread faith in the divining rod is no more proof 

 of its truth than that in many once universal beliefs now regarded 

 as superstitions. The belief in witchcraft was once more general 

 than that now in the divining rod; it was accepted by parliaments 

 and law courts as indubitable. 



Thus in 1730 William Forbes, professor of law in the University 

 of Glasgow (Institutes of the Law of Scotland, Vol. II, chap. 3, 

 pp. 32-41), describes witchcraft as if there were no doubt of its 

 actuality, and says that " the ordinary doom against witches is to be 

 strangled or worried at a stake till they be dead, and thereafter 

 their bodies to be burnt to ashes * * *." Witches were hunted 

 down and slain in this country till the middle of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury. Belief in fetish is now almost universal in Africa, and it 

 appears under present conditions ineradicable, for it is maintained 

 by the combination of the insight and special knowledge of the witch 

 doctor, of occasional coincidences, and of skill in blurring over fail- 

 ures which are soon forgotten by credulous people in regard to what 

 they wish to believe or are told to believe. Belief in superstitions 

 is by no means extinct. Many survive and new ones arise and be- 

 come entrenched by habit. It may seem disrespectful to those who 

 believe in the divining rod to compare it to such an obsolete habit 

 as witch hunting or to the crude ideas of primitive races, but the 

 human mind in all people and amongst all ages has many features 

 in common and in greatly influenced by coincidences and unex- 

 plained phenomena. 



The survival of the use of the divining rod in the search for water 

 after its many other uses have been abandoned is in my opinion due 

 to shallow supplies of water being scattered abundantly, but so 

 irregularly and elusively that their discovery is often a matter of 

 chance. Some observers are especially quick in detecting the faint 

 clues to their position, and in the areas where diviners are mostly 

 used a large number of successes is inevitable owing to the wide 

 distribution of undero-round water. 



