“THE DIVINING ROD.”

Gisborne Times, Volume XXX, Issue 3556, 22 June 1912, Page 10

“THE DIVINING ROD.”

SUPPOSED POWER TO TRACK CRIMINALS.

A commission lias been appointed in Germany to Investigate, the working of the divining -rod. The commission will only concern itself with the rod’s discovery of water, leaving on one side its once supposed power to track down criminals. This, the Journal des Debats thinks, is a mistake, in view of the increasing difficulty in punishing crime. It will be news to most people that the divining rod was ever used as an instrument of justice, but its vogue in this department of life was once tremendous. and several high officials of Church and State have testified to its miraculous power. Major Richardson’s bloodhounds, and even the far-famed Odessa police dog Spitz, cannot be mentioned in the same breath as the humble twig in the hands of a sensitive person, if all the tales are true. Take the following one as an example: A wine-seller and his wife were found dead in their shop at Lyons, killed with a billhook, and their savings had disappeared. No one had witnessed the crime, and all inquiries proved utterly futile. Then. one of their neighbors summoned from Daupliine a peasant named Jacques Aymar, who had a reputation for being able to follow up the trick of robbers and recover stolen property. He came, took a twig out of a broom, and went into the shop. When he stood over the place where the bodies had been found the twig began to twist about. At that a Dr. Panthot felt Aymars pulse, and pronounced him to be suffering from fever. Aymar himself said he felt deadly sick. However, he overcame the feeling, and followed the lead of his twig, which took him along several streets, into the court of the Archbishop’s palace, over the bridge spanning the Rhone, and down the right bank of the. river, until the magistrates who were folkwmg t-egan to gasp for breath. Finally, they were guided to the house of a gardener, where Aymar declared that the murderers, three in number, had sat down and had a drink. The twig, it was said, even directed him to the bottle from which they had drunk. Two children confirmed the statement that three men had stopped there a im> ment. - However, night was coming on; everybody was tired, and the search was broken off. Then M. Panthot proposed as a test that the fatal billhooks should be buried with several other billhooks in the garden. The twig discovered it. and the doctor's scepticism vanished. Next day, ami for some days after, the twig took the party down the Rhone "«!.* they eventually reached jßeawcaiiie, where the movements of the twig indiacted that the murderers had separated, hut it steered for the prison. Here only an "hour before a young humpback had been lodged for a trivial misdemeanor. The twig led Aymar to this fellow, and he was charged with the crime. Ho stoutly denied it, but on torture being applied confessed, and was sent to the gallows.