THE LOST NOTEBOOKS OF LOREN EISELEY edited...

THE LOST NOTEBOOKS OF LOREN EISELEY edited by Kenneth Heuer, illustrated by Leslie Morrill (Little, Brown: $12.95). When Loren Eiseley died in 1977, he left a haphazard collection of notebooks filled with poetry, letters and rough drafts of essays and stories. Kenneth Heuer, his longtime editor, sifted through these scattered fragments to present the reader with a chance to see the mind of the noted scientist-humanist at work. Although Eiseley was known primarily as a science writer, the most striking works in this anthology are fiction: “The Toad,” an early draft of a short story in which an anthropologist who desecrates a Zuni tomb incurs the wrath of Toxlol, the rain god; and the beginnings of “The Snow Wolf,” a projected novel about a dire wolf during the last Ice Age. Eiseley never lost sight of the essential unity between man and nature and, in beautifully crafted prose, he expressed his misgivings about the future of humanity. “I do not fear our extinction particularly,” he wrote in 1970. “What I really fear is that man will ruin the planet before he departs. I have sometimes thought, looking out over the towers of New York from some high place, what a beautiful ruin it would make in heaps of fallen masonry, with the forest coming back. Now I fear for the forest itself.”