• Such examples are pitiable ; but it is often
difficult enough to know where superstition ends and science begins. An archi- tect of fame told me, this very day on which I write, that he habitually uses a water diviner before sinking a well for this or that house of his designing. In one case a firm of well .borers refused to do preliminary work for finding water on the ground that if the diviner had said there was water there at a particular depth, water was there and any other test was otiose. One of the more successful diviners practises also, and by virtue of the same gift, the art of the healing hand. The idea is that the fingers contain some electro-magnetic virtue .which can disperse rheumatic pains as it can feel, through the aid of the forked stick, the fellow force in running water. SO we ever come back to the maxim : omnia exeunt in mysterium
W. BEACH THOHAS.
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