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...Divining" with rods or twigs or arrows goes back to earliest history. But "dowsing" in its modern form, using the forked stick, seems to have started in 16th-Century Germany. Even educated men like Melanchthon believed that the twigs of trees above mineral veins drooped downward, attracted by the deposit below. Miners in the Harz Mountains put this principle to hopeful use, searching for minerals with forked, ore-seeking twigs...
Homage to Cloacina. These, and a thousand other sordid details-all inspired by Cloacina, Goddess of the Sewers -appear in British Author Reginald Reynolds' Cleanliness and Godliness-"A Discussion of the Problems of Sanitation from Earliest Times to the Present Day." Unlike most plumbings of such channels, Cleanliness and Godliness is a first-rate literary essay, overflowing with sanity and bubbling with wit. Its heroes include Moses (whose laws, says Author Reynolds, were based less on divine sanction than on pamphlets issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Health); Elizabethan Sir John Harington, the inventor of the water-closet...
When the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra tunes up at Agassiz tomorrow night at 8:15 o'clock, it will be continuing at tradition which began while Josef Haydn was still alive and Franz Schubert, a child of II, was pecking out his earliest sonatas. The Pierian Sodality of 1808, which forms the core of the orchestra, antedates the New York Philharmonic by some 26 years...
...very much interested in the debate," he said, but, "cannot make a decision on this question or set a date" until after a meeting next week at which it will discuss a contemplated forum and determine the group's general policy. Worthington added that the earliest possible date for the encounter between the two organizations would be "about the middle...
John's literary skill is at times no match for his filial feeling. According to John's earliest memories (Oak Park, Ill. at the turn of the century): "Papa liked vaudeville! Vaudeville liked Papa!-Papa designed most of Mama's dresses. Most of Mama's dresses were brown!" The first curtain came down with a rush when Wright tired of the role of Papa and walked out on his wife and six children "overnight-he didn't even say goodbye...