| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: farm, as usual. The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his
mind as completely as if they had been whisked away on a magic
rug.
Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life.
She was contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and
drudgery. The Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and
Mrs. Huckins was always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pigs'
feet and shredding cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being
destined for the free-lunch counter downstairs. Bella had early
made up her mind that there should be no boiling and stewing and
frying in her life. Whenever she could find an excuse she
 One Basket |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: its longitudinal vibration, and the absence of the same power in the
case of vibrating air (enclosed in a glass organ-pipe), seems to be
analogous to the presence and absence of Faraday's effect in the
same two substances.
Faraday never, to my knowledge, attempted to give, even in
conversation, a picture of the molecular condition of his heavy
glass when subjected to magnetic influence. In a mathematical
investigation of the subject, published in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society for 1856, Sir William Thomson arrives at the
conclusion that the 'diamagnetic' is in a state of molecular
rotation.
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