[From Brand's Popular Antiquities.]
At the end of Henry Alan's edition of Cicero's treatise De Divinatione, and De Fate, 1839, will be found "Catalogus auctorum de divinatione ac fato, de oraculis, de somniis, de astrologia, de dæmonibus, de magia id genus aliis."
With the divining rod seems connected a lusus naturae of ash tree bough resembling the litui of the Roman augurs and the Christian pastoral staff which still obtains a place, if not on this account I know not why, in the catalogue of popular superstitions. Seven or eight years ago, I remember to have seen one of these, which I thought extremely beautiful and curious, in the house of an old woman at Beeralston, in Devonshire, of whom I would most gladly have purchased it; but she declined parting with it on any account, thinking it would be unlucky to do so. Mr. Gostling, in the Antiquarian Repertory, ii, 164, has some observations on this subject. He thinks the lituus or staff, with the crook at one end, which the augurs of old carried as badges of their profession and instruments in the superstitious exercise of it, was not made of metal but of the substance above mentioned. Whether, says he, to call it a work of art or nature may be doubted: some were probably of the former kind; others, Hogarth, in his Analysis of Beauty, calls lusus naturæ found in plants of different sorts, and in one of the plates of that work gives a specimen of a very elegant one, a branch of ash. I should rather, continues he, style it a distemper or distortion of nature; for it seems the effect of a wound by some insect which, piercing to the heart of the plant with its proboscis, poisons that, while the bark remains uninjured and proceeds in its growth, but formed into various stripes, flatness and curves for the want of the support which nature designed it. The beauty, some of these arrive at, might well consecrate them to the mysterious fopperies of heathenism, and their rarity occasions imitations of them by art. The pastoral staff of the Church of Rome seems to have been formed from the vegetable litui, though the general idea is that it is an imitation of the shepherd's crook. The engravings given in the Antiquarian Repertory are of carved branches of the ash.
[From Modern Magic, by M. Shele de Vere, published 1873.]
The relations in which some men stand to nature are sometimes so close as to enable them to make discoveries which are impossible to others.
This is, for instance, the case with persons who feel the presence of waters or of metals. The former have, from time immemorial, generally used a wand, the so-called divining rod, which, according to Pliny, was already known to the ancient Etruscans as a means for the discovery of hidden springs.
An Italian author, Amoretti, who has given special attention to this subject, states that at least every fifth man is susceptible to the influence of water and metals, but this is evidently an over-estimate.
In recent times many persons have been known to possess this gift of discovering hidden springs or subterranean masses of water, and these have but rarely employed an instrument.
Catharine Beutler, of Thurgovia, in Switzerland, and Anna Maria Brugger, of the same place, were both so seriously affected by the presence of water that they fell into violent nervous excitement when they happened to cross places beneath which, large quantities were concealed, and became perfectly exhausted.