Today's Stichomancy for Jonas Salk

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis:

plicated. All about Homozygotes and Heterozy- gotes, you know.

The Homozygotes are -- well, you might call them the aristocrats, you know; thoroughbreds.

And the Heterozygotes are the hybrids.

Only, of course, they don't need to be goats at all.

Not but what they COULD be goats, you know, just as easily as horses or cows or human beings.

But whether goats or humans, don't you think the great lesson of Heredity is that Blood will Tell?

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner:

the child within you.' And when the child was born and the young woman strong, the old woman took a cloth and filled it with all the grain that was in the basket; and she put the grain on the young woman's head and tied the child on her back, and said, 'Go, keeping always along the bank of the river, till you come north to the land where our people are gone; and some day you can send and fetch me.' And the young woman said, 'Have you corn in the basket to last till they come?' And she said, 'I have enough.' And she sat at the broken door of the cave and watched the young woman go down the hill and up the river bank till she was hidden by the bush; and she looked down at the plain below, and she saw the spot where the kraal had been and where she had planted mealies when she was a young girl--"

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Works of Samuel Johnson by Samuel Johnson:

Leave them to manage for thee, and to grant What their unerring wisdom sees thee want. DRYDEN.

AS every scheme of life, so every form of writing, has its advantages and inconveniences, though not mingled in the same proportions. The writer of essays escapes many embarrassments to which a large work would have exposed him; he seldom harasses his reason with long trains of consequences, dims his eyes with the perusal of antiquated volumes, or burthens his memory with great accumulations of preparatory knowledge. A careless glance upon

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 A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy:

Elfride set to work there and then. Her one desire for the last fortnight seemed likely to be realized. As happens with sensitive and secluded minds, a continual dwelling upon the subject had magnified to colossal proportions the space she assumed herself to occupy or to have occupied in the occult critic's mind. At noon and at night she had been pestering herself with endeavours to perceive more distinctly his conception of her as a woman apart from an author: whether he really despised her; whether he thought more or less of her than of ordinary young women who never ventured into the fire of criticism at all. Now she would have the satisfaction of feeling that at any rate he knew her true

A Pair of Blue Eyes