| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: of the terraces at Coquimbo (to a height of 250 feet),
but are embedded in a friable calcareous rock, which in some
places is as much as between twenty and thirty feet in
thickness, but is of little extent. These modern beds rest on an
ancient tertiary formation containing shells, apparently all
extinct. Although I examined so many hundred miles of
coast on the Pacific, as well as Atlantic side of the continent,
I found no regular strata containing sea-shells of
recent species, excepting at this place, and at a few points
northward on the road to Guasco. This fact appears to me
highly remarkable; for the explanation generally given by
 The Voyage of the Beagle |
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 Theaetetus by Plato: THEODORUS: He who is sitting by you, Socrates, will not easily avoid being
drawn into an argument; and when I said just now that you would excuse me,
and not, like the Lacedaemonians, compel me to strip and fight, I was
talking nonsense--I should rather compare you to Scirrhon, who threw
travellers from the rocks; for the Lacedaemonian rule is 'strip or depart,'
but you seem to go about your work more after the fashion of Antaeus: you
will not allow any one who approaches you to depart until you have stripped
him, and he has been compelled to try a fall with you in argument.
SOCRATES: There, Theodorus, you have hit off precisely the nature of my
complaint; but I am even more pugnacious than the giants of old, for I have
met with no end of heroes; many a Heracles, many a Theseus, mighty in
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