Perhaps one good word may be said for the divining rod. Considering the chances it has enjoyed, the rod has done less mischief than might have been expected. It might very well have become, in Europe, as in Asia and Africa, a kind of ordeal, or method of searching for and trying malefactors. Men like Jacques Aymar might have played, on a larger scale, the part of Hopkins, the witch-finder. Aymar was, indeed, employed by some young men to point out, by help of the wand, the houses of ladies who had been more frail than faithful. But at the end of the seventeenth century in France, this research was not regarded with favour, and put the final touch on the discomfiture of Aymar. So far as we know, the hunchback of Lyons was the only victim of the 'twig' who ever suffered in civilised society. It is true that, in rural England, the movements of a Bible, suspended like a pendulum, have been thought to point out the guilty. But even that evidence is not held good enough to go to a jury. FOOTNOTES: [182] Preller, _Ausgewählte Aufsätze_, p. 154. [183] Tylor, _Prim. Cult._, ii. 156. Pinkerton, vii. 357. [184] _Universities Mission to Central Africa_, p. 217. _Prim. Cult._, ii. 156, 157. [185] Quoted in _Jacob's Rod_: London, n.d., a translation of _La Verge de Jacob_, Lyon, 1693. [186] _Lettres sur la Baguette_, pp. 106-112. _HOTTENTOT MYTHOLOGY._ 'What makes mythology mythological, in the true sense of the word, is what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or miraculous.' So says Mr. Max Müller in the January number of the _Nineteenth Century_ for 1882. Men's attention would never have been surprised into the perpetual study and questioning of mythology if it had been intelligible and dignified, and if its report had been in accordance with the reason of civilised and cultivated races. What mythologists wish to discover is the origin of the countless disgusting, amazing, and incongruous legends which occur in the myths of all known peoples. According to Mr. Müller--