Word: melanchthon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...