The Immense Journey Read online

  If the day comes when the slime of the laboratory for the first time crawls under man’s direction, we shall have great need of humbleness. It will be difficult for us to believe, in our pride of achievement, that the secret of life has slipped through our fingers and eludes us still. We will list all the chemicals and the reactions. The men who have become gods will pose austerely before the popping flashbulbs of news photographers, and there will be few to consider—so deep is the mind-set of an age—whether the desire to link life to matter may not have blinded us to the more remarkable characteristics of both.

  As for me, if I am still around on that day, I intend to put on my old hat and climb over the wall as usual I shall see strange mechanisms lying as they lie here now, in the autumn rain, strange pipes that transported the substance of life, the intricate seedcase out of which the life has flown. I shall observe no thing green, no delicate transpirations of leaves, nor subtle comings and goings of vapor. The little sunlit factories of the chloroplasts will have dissolved away into common earth.

  Beautiful, angular, and bare the machinery of life will lie exposed, as it now is, to my view. There will be the thin, blue skeleton of a hare tumbled in a little heap, and crouching over it I will marvel, as I marvel now, at the wonderful correlation of parts, the perfect adaptation to purpose, the individually vanished and yet persisting pattern which is now hopping on some other hill. I will wonder, as always, in what manner “particles” pursue such devious plans and symmetries. I will ask once more in what way it is managed, that the simple dust takes on a history and begins to weave these unique and never recurring apparitions in the stream of time. I shall wonder what strange forces at the heart of matter regulate the tiny beating of a rabbit’s heart or the dim dream that builds a milkweed pod.

  It is said by men who know about these things that the smallest living cell probably contains over a quarter of a million protein molecules engaged in the multitudinous coordinated activities which make up the phenomenon of life. At the instant of death, whether of man or microbe, that ordered, incredible spinning passes away in an almost furious haste of those same particles to get themselves back into the chaotic, unplanned earth.

  I do not think, if someone finally twists the key successfully in the tiniest and most humble house of life, that many of these questions will be answered, or that the dark forces which create lights in the deep sea and living batteries in the waters of tropical swamps, or the dread cycles of parasites, or the most noble workings of the human brain, will be much if at all revealed. Rather, I would say that if “dead” matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful powers, and may not impossibly be, as Hardy has suggested, “but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.”

  A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, LOREN EISELEY was born into a family which homesteaded in that region when it was still a territory. His first contact with nature lay in the salt flats and ponds around Lincoln, and in the mammoth bones hoarded in the old red brick museum on the campus of the University of Nebraska. Receiving his A.B. degree there, he completed graduate work in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Returning to the Midwest for his first academic job, he taught at the University of Kansas. He later became head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio, then returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 to head the Department of Anthropology. He also was Curator of Early Man in the University Museum.

  Dr. Eiseley lectured at a number of universities, including Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California. He was president of the American Institute of Human Paleontology, and a contributor to many leading scientific journals as well as periodicals such as Harper’s, American Scholar, and Gentry.

  For a number of years he was active in the search for early postglacial man in the western United States, and worked extensively in the high plains, mountains, and deserts bordering the Rocky Mountains from Canada into Mexico.

  At his death in 1977, Dr. Eiseley was Benjamin Franklin and University Professor of History and Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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