Here the points to be noted are, first, the violent movement of the sticks, which the men could hardly hold; next, the physical agitation of the men. The former point is illustrated by the confession of a civil engineer writing in the _Times_. This gentleman had seen the rod successfully used for water; he was asked to try it himself, and he determined that it should not twist in his hands 'if an ocean rolled under his feet.' Twist it did, however, in spite of all his efforts to hold it, when he came above a concealed spring. Another example is quoted in the _Quarterly Review_, vol. xxii. p. 374. A narrator, in whom the editor 'had implicit confidence,' mentions how, when a lady held the twig just over a hidden well, 'the twig turned so quick as to snap, breaking near her fingers.' There seems to be no indiscretion in saying, as the statement has often been printed before, that the lady spoken of in the _Quarterly Review_ was Lady Milbanke, mother of the wife of Byron. Dr. Hutton, the geologist, is quoted as a witness of her success in the search for water with the divining rod. He says that, in an experiment at Woolwich, 'the twigs twisted themselves off below her fingers which were considerably indented by so forcibly holding the rods between them.'[185] Next, the violent excitement of the four young men of the Mauganja is paralleled by the physical experience of the lady quoted in the _Quarterly Review_. 'A degree of agitation was visible in her face when she first made the experiment; she says this agitation was great' when she began to practise the art, or whatever we are to call it. Again, in _Lettres qui découvrent l'illusion_ (p. 93), we read that Jacques Aymar (who discovered the Lyons murderer in 1692) _se sent tout ému_--feels greatly agitated--when he comes on that of which he is in search. On page 97 of the same volume, the body of the man who holds the divining rod is described as 'violently agitated.' When Aymar entered the room where the murder, to be described later, was committed, 'his pulse rose as if he were in a burning fever, and the wand turned rapidly in his hands' (_Lettres_, p. 107). But the most singular parallel to the performance of the African wizard must be quoted from a curious pamphlet already referred to, a translation of the old French _Verge de Jacob_, written, annotated, and published by a Mr. Thomas Welton. Mr. Welton seems to have been a believer in mesmerism, animal magnetism, and similar doctrines, but the coincidence of his story with that of the African sorcerer is none the less remarkable. It is a coincidence which must almost certainly be 'undesigned.' Mr. Welton's wife was what modern occult philosophers call a 'Sensitive.' In 1851, he wished her to try an experiment with the rod in a garden, and sent a maid-servant to bring 'a certain stick that stood behind the parlour door. In great terror she brought it to the garden, her hand firmly