| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: Listomere, chiefly to say, with deep emotion: "Our poor Abbe Birotteau
has just received a frightful blow, which shows the most determined
hatred. He is appointed curate of Saint-Symphorien."
Saint-Symphorien is a suburb of Tours lying beyond the bridge. That
bridge, one of the finest monuments of French architecture, is
nineteen hundred feet long, and the two open squares which surround
each end are precisely alike.
"Don't you see the misery of it?" she said, after a pause, amazed at
the coldness with which Madame de Listomere received the news. "It is
just as if the abbe were a hundred miles from Tours, from his friends,
from everything! It is a frightful exile, and all the more cruel
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: account of Faraday's private relations. A hasty glance at the work
shows me that the reverent devotion of the biographer has turned to
admirable account the materials at his command.
The work of Dr. Bence Jones enables me to correct a statement
regarding Wollaston's and Faraday's respective relations to the
discovery of Magnetic Rotation. Wollaston's idea was to make the
wire carrying a current rotate round its own axis: an idea
afterwards realised by the celebrated Ampere. Faraday's discovery
was to make the wire carrying the current revolve round the pole of
a magnet and the reverse.
John Tyndall.
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