| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Master Key by L. Frank Baum: themselves to watch his movements.
"Perhaps they intend to starve me into surrender," he thought; "but
they won't succeed so long as my tablets hold out. And if, in time,
they should starve me, I'll be too thin and tough to make good eating;
so I'll get the best of them, anyhow."
Then he again lay down and began to examine his electrical traveling
machine. He did not dare take it apart, fearing he might not be able
to get it together again, for he knew nothing at all about its
construction. But he discovered two little dents on the edge, one on
each side, which had evidently been caused by the pressure of the rope.
"If I could get those dents out," he thought, "the machine might work."
 The Master Key |
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 On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: insects have been enlarged, and the wings of others have been reduced by
natural selection aided by use and disuse, so in the case of the cave-rat
natural selection seems to have struggled with the loss of light and to
have increased the size of the eyes; whereas with all the other inhabitants
of the caves, disuse by itself seems to have done its work.
It is difficult to imagine conditions of life more similar than deep
limestone caverns under a nearly similar climate; so that on the common
view of the blind animals having been separately created for the American
and European caverns, close similarity in their organisation and affinities
might have been expected; but, as Schiodte and others have remarked, this
is not the case, and the cave-insects of the two continents are not more
 On the Origin of Species |