In the manuscript Discourse on Witchcraft, 1705, written by John Bell, p. 41, I find the following account from Theophylact on the subject of rabdomanteia, or rod divination: “They set up two staffs, and having whispered some verses and incantations, the staffs fell by the operation of dæmons. Then they considered which way each of them fell, forward or backward, to the right or left hand, and are agreeably given responses, having made use of the fall of their staffs for their signs.” With the divining rod seems connected a lusus nature 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 in Beeralston, 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. Divination by the rod or wand is mentioned in the prophecy of Ezekiel. Hosea, too, reproaches the Jews as being infected with the like superstition: “My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declareth unto them.” Chap. iv. 12. Not only the Chaldeans used rods for divination, but almost every nation which has pretended to that science has practiced the same method. Herodotus mentions it as a custom of the Alani, and Tacitus of the old Germans. The earliest means made use of by the miners for the discovery of the lode was the divining rod. The method of procedure was to cut the twig of twelve months’ growth, into a forked shape, and to hold this by both hands in a peculiar way, walking across the land until the twig bent, which was taken as an indication of the locality of a lode. The person who generally practices this divination boasts himself to be the seventh son of a seventh son. The twig of hazel bends in his hands to the conviction of the miners that ore is present; but then the peculiar manner in which the twig is held, bringing muscular action to bear upon it, accounts for its gradual deflection, and the circumstances of the strata walked over50 always containing ore gives a further credit to the process of divination. The vulgar notion, still prevalent in the north of England, of the hazel’s tendency to a vein of lead ore, seam or stratum of coal, &c., seems to be a vestige of this rod divination. The virgula divina, or bocalns divinatorius, is a forked branch in the form of a Y, cut off an hazel stick, by means whereof people have pretended to discover mines, springs, &c., underground. The method of using it is this: the person who breaks it, walking very slowly over the places where he suspects mines or springs may be, the effluvia exhaling from the metals, or vapor from the water impregnating the wood, makes it dip, or incline, which is the sign of a discovery.