Kircher speaks of a tree in Chili, the leaves of which brought forth a certain kind of worm, which eventually became changed into serpents; and describes a plant which grew in the Molucca Islands, nicknamed "catopa," on account of its leaves when falling off being transformed into butterflies.

The astrologer Lilly made sundry experiments with the divining-rod, but was not always successful; and the Jesuit, Kircher, tried the powers of certain rods which were said to have sympathetic influences for particular metals, but they never turned on the approach of these.

He should have told the world a little, too, about the strange phenomenon of the Jesuit Kircher, in whom Popery attempted to recover the very ground which Behmen and the Protestant Nature-mystics were conquering from them.

Kircher, Ecstatic Journey to Heaven.

Kircher, and a few of the German naturalists, and black-letter foolsevery naturalist and black-letter man being more or less a fooldug up the question out of the pit of Teutonic dulness, and ever since, every traveller beyond the Needles, has had his theory, which was quite as good as his fact, and his fact, which was quite as good as his theory.

[The original of the story on which Schiller has founded this ballad, matchless perhaps for the power and grandeur of its descriptions, is to be found in Kircher.