| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: were not yet able to help us. They made welcome the Southerners who came
over in the interests of the South, they listened to the Southern
propaganda. Why? Because the South was the American version of their
aristocratic creed. To those who came over in the interests of the North
and of the Union they turned a cold shoulder, because they represented
Democracy; moreover, a Dis-United States would prove in commerce a less
formidable competitor. To Captain Bullock, the able and energetic
Southerner who put through in England the building and launching of those
Confederate cruisers which sank our ships and destroyed our merchant
marine, and to Mason and Slidell, the doors of dukes opened pleasantly;
Beecher and our other emissaries mostly had to dine beneath uncoroneted
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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 On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: intermediate variety will usually exist in lesser numbers than the two
forms which it connects; consequently the two latter, during the course of
further modification, from existing in greater numbers, will have a great
advantage over the less numerous intermediate variety, and will thus
generally succeed in supplanting and exterminating it.
We have seen in this chapter how cautious we should be in concluding that
the most different habits of life could not graduate into each other; that
a bat, for instance, could not have been formed by natural selection from
an animal which at first could only glide through the air.
We have seen that a species may under new conditions of life change its
habits, or have diversified habits, with some habits very unlike those of
 On the Origin of Species |