| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: elsewhere, in the abdomen, the insect is capable, for nearly half
an hour, of making use of its dart, its mandibles, its legs; and
woe to the Lycosa whom the stiletto reaches. I have seen some who,
stabbed in the mouth while biting close to the sting, died of the
wound within the twenty-four hours. That dangerous prey,
therefore, requires instantaneous death, produced by the injury to
the nerve-centres of the neck; otherwise, the hunter's life would
often be in jeopardy.
The Grasshopper order supplied me with a second series of victims:
Green Grasshoppers as long as one's finger, large-headed Locusts,
Ephippigerae. {12} The same result follows when these are bitten
The Life of the Spider |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy: far had been to excite the mind of a solitary heron,
which, after descending to the ground not far from her
path, stood with neck erect, looking at her.
Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a
prolonged and repeated call--"Waow! waow! waow!"
From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries
spread as if by contagion, accompanied in some cases by
the barking of a dog. It was not the expression of the
valley's consciousness that beautiful Tess had arrived,
but the ordinary announcement of
milking-time--half-past four o'clock, when the dairymen
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: still more, it was the wicked man that bore his years the
handsomest. My lady was quite transfigured into the matron, a
becoming woman for the head of a great tableful of children and
dependents. My lord was grown slack in his limbs; he stooped; he
walked with a running motion, as though he had learned again from
Mr. Alexander; his face was drawn; it seemed a trifle longer than
of old; and it wore at times a smile very singularly mingled, and
which (in my eyes) appeared both bitter and pathetic. But the
Master still bore himself erect, although perhaps with effort; his
brow barred about the centre with imperious lines, his mouth set as
for command. He had all the gravity and something of the splendour
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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 Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: So then he got to wandering along, and pretty soon,
sure enough, he was telling! He was poking along through
his ups and downs, and when he come to that place he went
right along. He says:
"It was a confidence game. We played it on a julery-shop
in St. Louis. What we was after was a couple of noble
big di'monds as big as hazel-nuts, which everybody was
running to see. We was dressed up fine, and we played
it on them in broad daylight. We ordered the di'monds
sent to the hotel for us to see if we wanted to buy,
and when we was examining them we had paste counterfeits
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