| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: through the opening at the top of the court had claimed him
as his own, and the priestess had come from the inner
temple to save him from the polluting hands of worldlings--
to save him as a human offering to their flaming deity.
And had he needed further assurance as to the correctness
of his theory he had only to cast his eyes upon the brownish-
red stains that caked the stone altar and covered the floor
in its immediate vicinity, or to the human skulls which
grinned from countless niches in the towering walls.
The priestess led the victim to the altar steps. Again the
galleries above filled with watchers, while from an arched
The Return of Tarzan |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: generally a slower process than their production: if the appearance and
disappearance of a group of species be represented, as before, by a
vertical line of varying thickness, the line is found to taper more
gradually at its upper end, which marks the progress of extermination, than
at its lower end, which marks the first appearance and increase in numbers
of the species. In some cases, however, the extermination of whole groups
of beings, as of ammonites towards the close of the secondary period, has
been wonderfully sudden.
The whole subject of the extinction of species has been involved in the
most gratuitous mystery. Some authors have even supposed that as the
individual has a definite length of life, so have species a definite
On the Origin of Species |
