There is nothing like faithful searching if you wish to find; so I advise you to look back also as far as Confucius, and then come down to the old monk, Roger Bacon, and it would not surprise me if you should ascertain that those old wise-heads had gone even farther than your humble servant into the mysteries of the divining rod. But I will not quote from these ancients; I will only look back a short hundred years. In Sir David Brewster's Philosophy you will find that he says that there is no doubt that the presence of water can be detected by the divining rod, although it can not be demonstrated by any known science. It was this last paragraph which I stumbled upon many years ago, that first brought me to a practical knowledge of this phenomenon. I read it, and being on a visit in Raymond, Miss., I went to Judge ----, of that place, a scholar and a man of good sense, whom I took for granted had not failed to gather in, among his great stores of learning, something about the topic which had struck me so forcibly. I was not mistaken; the old gentleman told me that he had not only heard a good deal about this matter, but possessed, himself, the power of finding water, offering to show me how he proceeded. Soon after we went, accompanied by my brother, Dr. L., to a spot where there was a well known under-ground stream. The Judge cut three forked branches from a peach tree, each took one and we marched over the spot indicated, holding our rods according to the approved style of the "dowser" proper. At a certain point the switches in the hands of the Judge and myself went down simultaneously; the effect was very apparent; but my brother, in whose hands there was no movement, mercilessly ridiculed the whole proceeding; neither the Judge nor I being at all disconcerted by his skeptical derision of our _scientific_ research. I could not be shaken from faith in my actual, absolute experience, and was fully convinced that there was a mysterious power, beyond my ken, that turned the switch. I pondered over the matter, and resolved that at some future day I would examine more closely into it. This, to me, decisive epoch finally came after a great number of trials, always with satisfactory results as to the bare fact that water could be traced or discovered. That the switch did turn in my hand readily was undoubtedly true--the agency which moved it was the mystery. I knew that electricity had broad shoulders, and had always carried the weight of every unexplained phenomenon. I said this switch turns by electric force. Having evolved my theory, I set out to sustain it, by experiment. Upon inquiry, I found that not only could water be discovered, but it was asserted that minerals as readily answered to the call of the magic rod; and, indeed, that even their depth beneath the earth's surface might be computed.