| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: end under which the three eye-holes are situated; when this
is completed, the crab commences hammering with its heavy
claws on one of the eye-holes till an opening is made. Then
turning round its body, by the aid of its posterior and narrow
pair of pincers, it extracts the white albuminous substance.
I think this is as curious a case of instinct as ever
I heard of, and likewise of adaptation in structure between
two objects apparently so remote from each other in the
scheme of nature, as a crab and a cocoa-nut tree. The
Birgos is diurnal in its habits; but every night it is said to
pay a visit to the sea, no doubt for the purpose of moistening
 The Voyage of the Beagle |
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 Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: life-giving garment of perpetual health and youth.
It is too sad to think long about, lest we become very
Heraclituses. Let us take the other side of the matter with
Democritus, try to laugh man out of a little of his boastful
ignorance and self-satisfied clumsiness, and tell him, that if the
House of Commons would but summon one of the little Paramecia from
any Thames' sewer-mouth, to give his evidence before their next
Cholera Committee, sanitary blue-books, invaluable as they are,
would be superseded for ever and a day; and sanitary reformers
would no longer have to confess, that they know of no means of
stopping the smells which in past hot summers drove the members out
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