| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: there was the door to ye! He had that zeal for the Lord, it was a fair
wonder to hear him pray, but the family has aye had a gift that way."
This father was twice married, once to a dark woman of the old Ellwald
stock, by whom he had Gilbert, presently of Cauldstaneslap; and,
secondly, to the mother of Kirstie. "He was an auld man when he married
her, a fell auld man wi' a muckle voice - you could hear him rowting
from the top o' the Kye-skairs," she said; "but for her, it appears she
was a perfit wonder. It was gentle blood she had, Mr. Archie, for it
was your ain. The country-side gaed gyte about her and her gowden hair.
Mines is no to be mentioned wi' it, and there's few weemen has mair hair
than what I have, or yet a bonnier colour. Often would I tell my dear
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: of chests and household goods who kept Venetian painting always
true to its primary pictorial condition of noble colour. For we
should remember that all the arts are fine arts and all the arts
decorative arts. The greatest triumph of Italian painting was the
decoration of a pope's chapel in Rome and the wall of a room in
Venice. Michael Angelo wrought the one, and Tintoret, the dyer's
son, the other. And the little 'Dutch landscape, which you put
over your sideboard to-day, and between the windows to-morrow, is'
no less a glorious 'piece of work than the extents of field and
forest with which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once
melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa,' as Ruskin says.
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: must be checked by destruction at some period of life. Our familiarity
with the larger domestic animals tends, I think, to mislead us: we see no
great destruction falling on them, and we forget that thousands are
annually slaughtered for food, and that in a state of nature an equal
number would have somehow to be disposed of.
The only difference between organisms which annually produce eggs or seeds
by the thousand, and those which produce extremely few, is, that the
slow-breeders would require a few more years to people, under favourable
conditions, a whole district, let it be ever so large. The condor lays a
couple of eggs and the ostrich a score, and yet in the same country the
condor may be the more numerous of the two: the Fulmar petrel lays but one
On the Origin of Species |
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 From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: develop a heat equal to that produced by 16,000 globes of coal,
each equal in bulk to our terrestrial globe."
"Good additional heat for the sun," replied Michel Ardan, "of
which the inhabitants of Uranus or Neptune would doubtless not
complain; they must be perished with cold on their planets."
"Thus, my friends," said Barbicane, "all motion suddenly stopped
produces heat. And this theory allows us to infer that the heat
of the solar disc is fed by a hail of meteors falling
incessantly on its surface. They have even calculated----"
"Oh, dear!" murmured Michel, "the figures are coming."
"They have even calculated," continued the imperturbable Barbicane,
From the Earth to the Moon |
