What relation has the person of the operator to the motion observed in the divining rod?
What is the nature of the influence to which the person of the operator serves as a conductor?
Finally, what is the thing divined? the proximity of veins of metal or of running water? what or what not?
Then, let me at once premise, that upon the last point I have no information to offer. The uses to which the divining fork may be turned, are yet to be learned. But I think I shall be able to satisfy you, that the hazel fork in some hands, and in certain localities, held as I have described, actually moves spontaneously, and that the intervention of the human body is necessary to its motion; and that it serves as a conductor to an influence, which is either electricity, or something either combined with electricity, or very much resembling that principle in some of its habitudes.
I should observe, that I was no wiser than you are upon this subject, till the summer of 1843, and held the tales told of the divining rod to be nonsense, the offspring of mere self-delusion, or of direct imposture. And I think the likeliest way of removing your disbelief, will be to tell you the steps by which my own conversion took place.
In the summer of 1843, I lived some months under the same roof with a Scottish gentleman, well informed, of a serious turn of mind, endowed with the national allowance of caution, shrewdness, and intelligence. I saw a good deal of him; and one day by accident the subject of the divining rod was mentioned. He told me that at one time his curiosity having been raised upon the subject, he had taken pains to learn what there was in it. And for that purpose he had obtained an introduction to Mrs. R., sister of Sir G. R., then residing at Southampton, whom he learned to be one of those in whose hands the divining rod was said to move. He visited the lady, who was polite enough to show him what the performance amounted to, and to answer all his questions, and to allow him to try some simple experiment to test the reality of the phenomenon and its nature.
Mrs. R. told my friend, that being at Cheltenham in 1806, she saw for the first time the divining rod used by the late Mrs. Colonel Beaumont, who possessed the power of imparting motion to it in a very remarkable degree. Mrs. R. tried the experiments herself at the time, but without any success. She was, as it happened, very far from well. Afterwards, in the year 1815, being asked by a friend how the divining rod was held, and how it is to be used, on showing it she observed that the hazel fork moved in her hands. Since then, whenever she had repeated the experiment, the power has always manifested itself, though with varying degrees of energy.
Mrs. R. then took my friend to a part of the shrubbery, where she knew, from former trials, the divining rod would move in her hands. It did so, to my friend’s extreme astonishment; and even continued to do so, when, availing himself of Mrs. R.’s permission, my friend grasped her hands with such firmness, as to preclude the possibility of any muscular action of her wrist or fingers influencing the result.
On another day my friend took with him pieces of copper and iron wire about a foot and a half long, bent something into the form of the letter V, with length enough in the horizontal limbs of the figure to form a sufficient handle for either branch of these new-fashioned divining forks. He found that these instruments moved quite as freely in Mrs. R.’s hands as the hazel fork had done. Then he coated the two handles of one of them with sealing-wax, leaving, however, the extreme ends free and uncovered. When Mrs. R. used the rod so prepared, grasping it by the parts alone which were coated with sealing-wax, and walked over the same piece of ground as before, the wires exhibited no movement whatever. As often, however, as, with no greater change than touching the free ends of the wire with her thumbs, Mrs. R. established again a direct contact with the instrument, it again moved. The motion again ceased, as often as that direct contact was interrupted.
This simple narrative, made to me by the late Mr. George Fairholm, carried conviction to my mind of the reality of the phenomenon. I asked my friend why he had not pursued the subject further. He said he had often thought of doing so; and had, he believed, been mainly prevented by meeting with a work of the Count de Tristan, entitled, “Recherches sur quelques Effluves Terrestres,” published at Paris in 1826, in which facts similar to those which he had himself verified were narrated, and a vast body of additional curious experiments detailed.