THE IRRIGATION AGE. 233 



and especially for the beautiful principles of hydraulics, I sneered at 

 the water witch as a humbug until one of our most cautious and 

 reliable engineers told me it was not and showed me how to use it. 

 Like every one else I jumped at the theory of unconcious muscular 

 motion. But as that itself was quite a curiosity I determined to run 

 that down. A long series of experiments, among others trying it 

 with children of ten or twelve years of age who had no idea of what I 

 wanted of them, satisfied me that with about five persons out of ten 

 the dip of the rod is real and not imaginary or due to muscular motion 

 of any kind. Hundreds of trials over places where I knew there was 

 an underground stream or a pipe convinced me that running water 

 under ground will affect it in the hands of about five out of ten 

 persons and that in the other five nothing will produce any motion. 

 I am still satisfied that water underground will do so and on three 

 different occasions on three different pieces of ground I have run 

 within three feet of the marks made there before by some of the 

 experts travelling about and in whom so many have such confidence 

 as to pay them good fees. I would not be afraid to take the contract 

 to locate a pipe for miles blindfolded if water were moving in it and 

 do it within a very few feet. But how many of all the experts have 



TESTED IT WHERE THEY KNEW THERE WAS NO WATER, OR WATER 

 AT SUCH A DEPTH OR IN SUCH SMALL QUANTITY AS TO BE 



UNAVAILABLE ? 



I believe I am the only one. I have tried it hundreds of times on 

 sharp, dry ridges where it was plain that there could be no water for 

 four hundred feet. Something moved it there as well as where I 

 knew there was water, I mean moved it sometimes for generally in 

 such places there would be motion. 



What it was I know not but am quite certain that it was not 

 water, oil or any liquid with still less probability of its being good or 

 anything else of any value. 



In a recent action for misrepresentations in the sale of a ranch 

 I was sent by defendant's attorney to examine the ground and 

 especially the water supply. It was a fine bench of rich land on the 

 west side of the low range of dry porphory that runs through San 

 Diego county from six to ten miles from the coast. The rainfall was 

 only about twelve inches and the local watershed not large enough to 

 furnish ten miner's inches if one caught it all. One well some fifty 

 feet deep furnished about six thousand gallons a day or about half an 

 inch. Two others sixty to eighty feet deep were dry and always had 

 been. There was not a sign of damp ground or water vegetation of 

 any kind on the watershed. The hill ran only some two hundred 

 feet above the bench and then dropped into a canyon some four 

 hundred feet lower which rose into a range of granite hills almost as 

 dry as the porphory. I knew the whole country for twenty miles 



