| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: me that the fact here is the direct reverse of what I supposed it to
be. The small bubbles are oxygen, and their smallness is due to the
perfect cleanness of the surface on which they are liberated.
The hydrogen adhering to the other electrode swells into large bubbles,
which rise in much slower succession; but when the current is reversed,
the hydrogen is liberated upon the cleansed wire, and then its bubbles
also become small.
Footnotes to Chapter 5
[1] Buff finds the quantity of electricity associated with one
milligramme of hydrogen in water to be equal to 45,480 charges of a
Leyden jar, with a height of 480 millimetres, and a diameter of 160
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: them. The man sat down on the cinder-road, looking up into the
murky sky.
"'T be late, Hugh. Wunnot hur come?"
He shook his head doggedly, and the woman crouched out of his
sight against the wall. Do you remember rare moments when a
sudden light flashed over yourself, your world, God? when you
stood on a mountain-peak, seeing your life as it might have
been, as it is? one quick instant, when custom lost its force
and every-day usage? when your friend, wife, brother, stood in
a new light? your soul was bared, and the grave,--a foretaste
of the nakedness of the Judgment-Day? So it came before him,
Life in the Iron-Mills |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street.
She threw changing glances at men who passed her, giving smiling
invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern and usually seeming
sedately unconscious of the men with a metropolitan seal upon their faces.
Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging
from the places of forgetfulness. She hurried forward through the
crowd as if intent upon reaching a distant home, bending forward in
her handsome cloak, daintily lifting her skirts and picking for her
well-shod feet the dryer spots upon the pavements.
The restless doors of saloons, clashing to and fro, disclosed
animated rows of men before bars and hurrying barkeepers.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
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 Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: forest still bore no small proportion to the cultivated ground.
The autumn wind wandered among the branches, whirling away the
leaves from all except the pine-trees, and moaning as if it
lamented the desolation of which it was the instrument. The road
had penetrated the mass of woods that lay nearest to the town,
and was just emerging into an open space, when the traveller's
ears were saluted by a sound more mournful than even that of the
wind. It was like the wailing of someone in distress, and it
seemed to proceed from beneath a tall and lonely fir-tree, in the
centre of a cleared but uninclosed and uncultivated field. The
Puritan could not but remember that this was the very spot which
Twice Told Tales |
