length and size may be tied together by a thread and will answer as well as the other." In the supplement to the Athenian Oracle, p. 234, we read that "the experiment of a hazel's tendency 'to a vein' of lead ore is limited to St. John Baptist's Eve, and that with an hazel of that same year's growth." There is a treatise in French entitled, _La Phisique Occulte ou Traite de la Baguette Divinatoire_, et de son utilite pour la decouverte des sources d'Eau, des Minieres, de Tresors caches, des Voleurs et des Meurtriers fugitifs: par M. L. L. de Vallemont pretre et docteur en theologie; 12 mo., Amsterdam, 1693. 464 pages. * * * * * [_From Brand's Popular Antiquities._] At the end of Henry Alan's edition of Cicero's treatise De Divinatione, and De Fate, 1839, will be found "Catalogus auctorum de _divinatione_ ac fato, de oraculis, de somniis, de astrologia, de dæmonibus, de magia id genus aliis." With the divining rod seems connected a _lusus naturae_ of ash tree bough resembling the litui of the Roman augurs and the Christian pastoral staff which still obtains a place, if not on this account I know not why, in the catalogue of popular superstitions. Seven or eight years ago, I remember to have seen one of these, which I thought extremely beautiful and curious, in the house of an old woman at Beeralston, in Devonshire, of whom I would most gladly have purchased it; but she declined parting with it on any account, thinking it would be unlucky to do so. Mr. Gostling, in the Antiquarian Repertory, ii, 164, has some observations on this subject. He thinks the lituus or staff, with the crook at one end, which the augurs of old carried as badges of their profession and instruments in the superstitious exercise of it, was not made of metal but of the substance above mentioned. Whether, says he, to call it a work of art or nature may be doubted: some were probably of the former kind; others, Hogarth, in his Analysis of Beauty, calls _lusus naturæ_ found in plants of different sorts, and in one of the plates of that work gives a specimen of a very elegant one, a branch of ash. I should rather, continues he, style it a distemper or distortion of nature; for it seems the effect of a wound by some insect which, piercing to the heart of the plant with its proboscis, poisons that, while the bark remains uninjured and proceeds in its growth, but formed into various stripes, flatness and curves for the want of the support which nature designed it. The beauty, some of these arrive at, might well consecrate them to the mysterious fopperies of heathenism, and their rarity occasions imitations of them by art. The pastoral staff of the Church of Rome seems to have been formed from the vegetable litui, though the general idea is that it is an imitation of the shepherd's crook. The engravings given in the Antiquarian Repertory are of carved branches of the ash. * * * * *