| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: population, one immigration following on another. He exemplifies
his theory by pointing to the endless political revolutions that
characterised Arcadia, Thessaly and Boeotia, the three richest
spots in Greece, as well as by the negative instance of the
undisturbed state in primitive time of Attica, which was always
remarkable for the dryness and poverty of its soil.
Now, while undoubtedly in these passages we may recognise the first
anticipation of many of the most modern principles of research, we
must remember how essentially limited is the range of the
ARCHAEOLOGIA, and how no theory at all is offered on the wider
questions of the general conditions of the rise and progress of
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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 Before Adam by Jack London: twenty generations we might have worked up to the
weaving of baskets. And of this, one thing is sure: if
once we wove withes into baskets, the next and
inevitable step would have been the weaving of cloth.
Clothes would have followed, and with covering our
nakedness would have come modesty.
Thus was momentum gained in the Younger World. But we
were without this momentum. We were just getting
started, and we could not go far in a single
generation. We were without weapons, without fire, and
in the raw beginnings of speech. The device of writing
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