| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: thread, and all a needle-woman's requirements lay beside them.
Everything was as fresh and clean as a shell that the sea had tossed
up on the beach. Genestas saw that a kitchen lay on the other side of
the passage, and that the staircase was at the further end of it. The
upper story, like the ground floor, evidently consisted of two rooms
only. "Come, do not be frightened," Benassis was saying to La
Fosseuse; "come down-stairs!"
Genestas promptly retreated into the sitting-room when he heard these
words, and in another moment a slender girl, well and gracefully made,
appeared in the doorway. She wore a gown of cambric, covered with
narrow pink stripes, and cut low at the throat, so as to display a
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species were
immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the
world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired
some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without proof,
that the geological record is so perfect that it would have afforded us
plain evidence of the mutation of species, if they had undergone mutation.
But the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species
has given birth to other and distinct species, is that we are always slow
in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate
steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when
Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and
On the Origin of Species |
