M. de Vallemont has no sympathy for those credulous students of natural philosophy who have brought the science into disrepute. They will scoff at the divining rod and yet swallow the grossest frauds without so much as blinking. He proceeds to give an illustration, and it will bear translating because surely it unfolds a unique yarn of buried treasure and has all the charm of novelty.
"Upon this subject there is nothing more entertaining than that which took place at the end of the last century, with regard to a boy who journeyed through several towns exhibiting a golden tooth which he declared had grown in the usual way.
"In the year 1595, towards Easter, a rumor spread that there was in the village of Weildorst in Silesia, Bohemia, a child seven years of age who had lost all his teeth, and that in the place of the last molar a gold tooth had appeared. No story ever created such a stir. Scholars took it up. In a short time, doctors and philosophers came forward to gain knowledge and to pass judgment, as though it were a case worthy of their consideration. The first to distinguish himself was Jacobus Horstius, Professor of Medicine in the University of Helmstad. This doctor, in a paper which he caused to be printed, demonstrated that this golden tooth was partly a work of nature and partly miraculous; and he declared that in whatever light one viewed it, it was manifestly a consolation sent from above to the Christians of Bohemia, on whom the Turks were then inflicting the worst barbarities.
"Martinus Rulandus published simultaneously with Horstius the story of the golden tooth. It is true that two years later Johannes Ingolsteterus refuted the story of Rulandus, but the latter in the same year, 1597, not in the least discouraged, defended his work against the attacks of Ingolsteterus.
"Andreas Libavius then entered the lists, and published a book in which he recounted what had been said for and against the golden tooth. This gave rise to great disputes concerning a matter which ultimately proved to be a somewhat clumsy deception. The child was taken to Breslau, where everybody hastened to see so wonderful a novelty. They brought him before a number of doctors, assembled in great perplexity to examine the famous golden tooth. Amongst them was Christophorus Rhumbaumius, a professor of medicine, who was most anxious to see before believing.
"First of all, a goldsmith, wishing to satisfy himself that the tooth was of gold, applied to it his touch-stone, and the line left on the stone appeared, to the naked eye, to be in real gold, but on the application of aqua fortis to this line, every trace disappeared, and a part of the swindle was exposed. Christophorus Khumbaumius, an intelligent and skillful man, on examining the tooth more closely, perceived in it a little hole, and, inserting a probe, found that it was simply a sheet of copper probably washed with gold. He could with ease have removed the copper covering had not the trickster, who was taking the child from town to town, opposed it, complaining bitterly of the injury that was being done him by thus depriving him of the chance of taking money from the curious and the credulous.
"The swindler and child disappeared, and no one knows to this day exactly what became of them. But because learned men have been duped now and then, that is no reason for perpetual doubt.... and although the story of the golden tooth be false, we should be wrong capriciously to reject that of the hazel rod which has become so famous."
Having extinguished the skeptics, as one snuffs a candle, by means of this admirable tale of the golden tooth, the learned author asserts that "it must denote great ignorance of France, and even of books, never to have heard of the divining rod. For I can say with certainty that I have met quite by chance, both in Paris and the provinces, more than fifty persons who have used this simple instrument in order to find water, precious metals and hidden treasure, and in whose hands it has actually turned. 'It is more reasonable,' says Father Malebranche, 'to believe one man who says, I have seen, than a million others who talk at random.'
"It is somewhat difficult to determine exactly the period at which the divining rod first came into use. I have discovered no reference to it by writers previous to the middle of the Fifteenth century. It is frequently referred to in the Testament de Basile Valentin, a Benedictine monk who flourished about 1490,[[2]] and I observe that he speaks of it in a way which might lead one to suppose that the use of this rod was known before that period.
"Might we venture to advance the theory that the Divine Rod was known and used nearly two thousand years ago?[[3]] Are we to count for naught Cicero's illusion to divination by means of the rod, at the end of the first book of his 'De Officiis,' 'If all that we need for our nourishment and clothing comes to us, as people say, by means of some divine rod, then each of us should relinquish public affairs and devote all his time to the study.'