Vol. LXVI. No. 3007. 
NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 14, 1907. 
WEEKLY. $1.00 PEK YEAR. 
THE “WATER WITCH’’ AND HIS ROD. 
Wl laf Made the Rod Turn ? 
In certain persons' hands a forked witch-hazel stick will 
dip down with a strong pull toward a vein of water in the 
ground or rock with force enough to twist the bark. What 
explanation do scicntitic men give for this phenomenon? 
z. P. B. 
Probably the best explanation which can be given of 
the divining rod phenomena applied to the location of 
water veins is afforded by an experiment conducted by 
Professor T. C. Chamberlin, head geologist of the 
University of Chicago, when in charge of the Wisconsin 
State Geological Survey in the Summer of 1873 or 1874. 
Professor Chamberlin, with the writer as field assistant, 
stopped at night with a very intelligent and, we believed, 
a very conscientious, honest man. He was interested 
in nature and particularly along geological lines, and 
our evening conversation with him brought out the 
fact that he believed lie possessed the power of locating 
very definitely veins 
of water with the 
aid of the divining 
rod. He preferred 
the witch hazel 
when he could get 
it, but would use 
the apple when the 
other was not avail¬ 
able. It was agreed 
that on the follow¬ 
ing morning he 
would make an ex¬ 
hibition of his 
method. Accord¬ 
ingly, after break¬ 
fast, he secured a 
forked apple limb, 
and we went to¬ 
gether into the field. 
Professor Chamber¬ 
lin and myself each 
observed his method 
carefully. He took 
the tips of the 
forked twig in his 
hands, held it tight¬ 
ly, inclining a little 
forward. Before 
starting it was was 
his custom appa¬ 
rently to carefully 
look the field over 
ahead of him, and 
he apparently fixed 
his eyes upon a 
place in the field, 
because he could be 
seen to walk with his eyes fixed, and as he neared 
the objective point the stick and his eyes changed their 
angle together, so that as he crossed what in his 
judgment was a vein of water both his eyes and the 
twig had come to look downward. After locating what 
he regarded as a vein of water it was his judgment 
that by starting from a different point and crossing 
this vein at different points he would find indications 
of stronger or weaker flows of water, according as the 
twig was strongly or feebly drawn downward. 
To us observing him and the positions in the field 
where he located veins of water it appeared evident 
that he had been a close observer of the influence of 
surface conditions and slopes upon the direction and 
concentration of water in underground drainage, and 
his predictions of veins of water, and especially where 
he would get the strongest flow, usually coincided with 
the conditions of topography which would tend to con¬ 
centrate the underground flow due to local slopes along 
certain lines. This is less apparent to casual observers. 
After he had made several predictions, and it was 
observed that he always held his divining rod in a 
certain manner, inclining away from him, Prof. Cham¬ 
berlin asked him if it made any difference to him how 
lie held his rod, and he said that it did not. Prof. 
Chamberlin then asked permission to place the rod in 
his hands. He did so, placing it in such a manner 
that the rod inclined backward and toward him, so 
that if the rod were drawn downward by any attrac¬ 
tive force it would have to bend downward toward 
the man’s body, but the fork was too long to drop en¬ 
tirely down in this direction. As the supposed vein of 
water was reached the twig turned, rising and then 
bending downward and outward, as it had done on 
previous occasions, but holding the stick as it was 
placed in the hands and grasping it tightly as the man 
regularly did, one arm of the twig was broken under 
the unconscious muscular effort of the operator in 
bringing it into the vertical position, pointing down¬ 
ward. I say unconscious muscular effort because it 
appeared to both of us, as we observed the operator, 
that he was entirely unconscious of any effort to de¬ 
ceive. On the other hand, his actions were apparently 
controlled and determined by a very strong convic- 
viction, the muscular effort responding, apparently un¬ 
consciously, to his expectation. This case appeared to 
be entirely in line with many of the phenomena which 
are associated with what we call mind reading. To 
illustrate: A mind reader asks a person in an audience 
to hide an object somewhere in the room while the 
operator is blindfolded, and, perhaps, in an adjacent 
room. This done, the person operated upon is di¬ 
rected to keep his mind constantly upon the object in 
which it is hidden. The operator will then, after put¬ 
ting himself in a mind-reading attitude, take the person 
who has hidden the object by the hands and urge him 
to run rapidly down one aisle and up another, de¬ 
pending upon the person who has hidden the object to 
give a clue to the direction in which the hidden object 
may be by himself getting ready to turn as he is ap¬ 
proaching the aisle down which he knows he must pass 
to reach the object. Unless a person being so operated 
upon is keenly on his guard,- and especially if he has 
any faith at all in the ability of the mind reader, he 
will, without being conscious of the effort, begin to 
get ready to turn, or to get ready to stop, before the 
point is reached, and the shrewd operator, who is 
carefully watching for these movements, will recog¬ 
nize them and will actually turn the person operated 
upon, or begin to halt him before the turning point or 
the stopping point has been reached. So it seemed to 
be with the man who operated before us with the 
divining rod. His convictions were very strong that 
water would be found in a certain locality, and his 
conviction was so strong that his obedience to it was 
unconscious. 
This operator was very confident of his ability to pre¬ 
dict the places where water was to be found. He had 
much less faith, 
however, in his 
ability to predict 
the distance below 
the surface. That 
the users of divin¬ 
ing rods are so of¬ 
ten successful 
grows out of the 
general fact that 
that there are com¬ 
paratively few lo¬ 
calities where water 
will not be reached 
at one depth or an¬ 
other, because the 
underground water 
in humid climates 
forms a more or less 
continuous sheet, 
and, conforming in 
a general way to the 
surface undulations 
of the ground, the 
underground water 
surface rising 
where the surface 
rises and falling 
where the surface 
falls. The general 
law is that the wa¬ 
ter falling on the 
surface as rain sinks 
into the ground and 
tends to flow to¬ 
ward the sea along 
lines of slope which 
are more or less 
nearly in the same direction that the water would take 
if it could not sink beneath the surface, but was com¬ 
pelled to flow along it. The result is that in moun¬ 
tainous and hilly countries, especially where under¬ 
lying rocks are more or less deeply covered with soil, 
the underground drainage waters tend to concentrate 
in the subsoil and flow most rapidly, or in greatest 
volume, along the valley axes, so that a shrewd ob¬ 
server in such a locality will be much more success¬ 
ful with a divining rod than one who is not as ob¬ 
serving, and so people come to have a reputation for 
an ability to use the divining rod, and the divining rod 
is thought to be much more successful or pronounced 
in its iiUications when in the hands of one person than 
it is when in the hands of almost anyone else in that 
neighborhood or district. f. h. k. 
R. N.-Y.—While F. H. K. disclaims the occult power 
of the water witch he shows that popular belief is not 
entirely wrong; only the credit rightly belongs to 
“horse sense.” 
RAISING A CROP OF FARM HANDS IN NEW JERSEY. Fig. 332. 
