Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/141

Rh 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 mountain 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 satisfactory. He chooses a point on the map, they bore the well in accordance 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 Cæsar 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 concludes 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 sensitileprojectile 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?