| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: they eat smells strong and swims with butter. They make no use of
either linen or plates. The persons of rank never touch what they
eat, but have their meat cut by their pages, and put into their
mouths. When they feast a friend they kill an ox, and set
immediately a quarter of him raw upon the table (for their most
elegant treat is raw beef newly killed) with pepper and salt; the
gall of the ox serves them for oil and vinegar; some, to heighten
the delicacy of the entertainment, add a kind of sauce, which they
call manta, made of what they take out of the guts of the ox; this
they set on the fire, with butter, salt, pepper, and onion. Raw
beef, thus relished, is their nicest dish, and is eaten by them with
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly
instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house,
though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still
overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked
out the window, and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay
the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer
evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none
was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote
horizon. I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for
many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not forget for
many a thousand more -- the same sweet and powerful song as of yore.
Walden |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: to consider how very poorly they were likely to fare when Davie Balfour
was no longer by to be their milk-cow; at which, to my very own great
surprise, the disposition of my mind turned bottom up. I was still
angry; I still hated her; and yet I thought I owed it to myself that
she should suffer nothing.
This carried me home again at once, where I found the mails drawn out
and ready fastened by the door, and the father and daughter with every
mark upon them of a recent disagreement. Catriona was like a wooden
doll; James More breathed hard, his face was dotted with white spots,
and his nose upon one side. As soon as I came in, the girl looked at
him with a steady, clear, dark look that might have been followed by a
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from U. S. Project Trinity Report by Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer: holdings in the Belgian Congo to the United States. Then, in March
1941, the element plutonium was isolated, and the plutonium-239
isotope was found to fission as readily as the scarce uranium isotope,
uranium-235. The plutonium, produced in a uranium-fueled nuclear
reactor, provided the United States with an additional source of
material for nuclear weapons (7; 12).
In the summer of 1941, the British Government published a report
written by the Committee for Military Application of Uranium
Detonation (MAUD). This report stated that a nuclear weapon was
possible and concluded that its construction should begin immediately.
The MAUD report, and to a lesser degree the discovery of plutonium,
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