Another dreamer/scientist, Nebraska author and naturalist, Loren Eiseley, explores the mysteries of man and nature in his 1946 book of essays, The Immense Journey. He asks his readers to think of his essays not as a guide, but as a “somewhat unconventional record of the prowling of one mind which has sought to explore, to understand and enjoy the miracles of this world, both in and out of science.”

Beginning with a short walk into a deep cleft in the earth where he suddenly comes face to face with a skull “embedded in the solid sandstone,” he reveals the wonders he’s seen and an almost mystical connection to living things both present and past. As he chips the skull out of rock, he begins a rumination on life and science that carries through the entire series of essays.

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water,” Eiseley writes as he begins an essay on the Platte River—and more generally on the river of life. He admits to an occasional expectation of seeing a living miracle boil out of a rooftop pool.

In his essays on the deep sea and the evolution of man, Eiseley is handicapped by his times. Decades of discoveries have made some of his science obsolete, but not his sense of wonder. “The fascination of lost worlds has long preoccupied humanity,” he writes and the essays make clear that he is no exception.

“There is no need to be frightened,” he writes in an essay entitled “The Snout.” “It is true some of the creatures are odd, but I find the situation rather heartening than otherwise. It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, and not through nor satisfied . . .”

As he writes of life coming ashore, he notes it was not a “magnificent march through the breakers and up the cliffs . . . [but] a steady advance made in suffocation and terror, amidst the leaching bite of chemical discomfort. It was made by the failures of the sea.”

He sees the evolution of flowering plants as an explosion of diversity that triggered a similar explosion of animal species. The angiosperms, he writes, provide an economy to proliferation of species—as a seed is “a fully equipped embryonic plant packed in a little enclosed box stuffed full of nutritious food.” With their ingenious means of travelling, those seeds embedded themselves everywhere and managed to compete with older spore-bearing or coniferous plants.

In an essay comparing a pair of living birds to intricate machines built by humans, Eiseley confesses his preference for birds. “. . . the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in an empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird.”

Of human evolution, he writes, “The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger, and the bear.”

Over a period of about twenty years, I’ve enjoyed prowling around the miracles of the world with Eiseley, often in places and environments that I know very well. I hope you’ll enjoy his prowling mind too.