Thus the voice of Loren Eiseley, Carlisle explains, “speaks from an innersky—that vast void within, where science, imagination, and feeling fuseinto a vision of existence at once both personal and scientific” (pp. 361). Nodoubt Carlisle was correct in his estimation; he precisely pinpointed thedistinctive source of Eiseley’s genius. He only hinted, however, that thisprocess may be inseparable from a personal walkabout which came to takeon an archetypal significance, inseparable for Eiseley from “the immensejourney”—the odyssey of our species.Eiseley, after all, envisioned his own work as a gift to his species,a gift of what might be called, after the sociobiologist Richard Dawkins(1976), “memes”—units of cultural transmission, mental replicators (1976,202–15). Because Eiseley (1969) hoped to create out of a rich inner world anoffering to be strewn “like blue plums in some gesture of love toward theuniverse all outward on a mat of leaves” (p. 232), and in so doing to enhancethe species’ own faith in the journey it may yet have to run, his writings arefilled with questioning about his own possible legacy as a pilot of humanlonging. He understood from his own experience the mysterious power ofbooks in shaping the course of lives. The most influential book in his ownlife, he claimed, was The Home Aquarium: How to Care for It, written bya man from New Jersey named Eugene Smith—a book that first inspiredEiseley’s interest in the natural world and hence his dual career as a writerand scientist. Looking back in old age on the phenomenal importance ofsuch a book in his life, he pondered the strange effects that books can workover both time and distance: “Did Eugene Smith of Hoboken think hisbook would have a lifelong impact on a boy in a small Nebraska town?I do not think so” (1975a, p. 170). Such thinking led him to wonder oftenwhat the influence of his own books might be in the lives of other humanbeings without his knowing. Like Bacon, Eiseley seemed to think of hisown works as “boats with precious cargoes launched on the great sea oftime” (1973, p. 60), and it is impossible not to see his own secret hopesrevealed in his suggestion that “like a mutation, an idea may be recordedin the wrong time, to lie latent like a recessive gene and spring once moreto life in an auspicious era” (1969, p. 60).Although childless himself and thus unable to perpetuate his own bio-logical legacy genetically, Eiseley nevertheless shared the dream of all greatminds: that his ideas, his insights, his poetry would at least survive him,that his memes would continue to make his presence felt within humanhistory, thus granting him some measure of immortality.Unlike a scientist, a poet, Bachelard (1958) once remarked, “If helooks through a microscope or a telescope . . . always sees the same thing”(p. 172). He sees always, that is, his own subjectivity, his own self-discovery.Whether he looked into space or into time, Loren Eiseley saw always