Eiseley seems to find it unfortunate that man can imagine different times but is locked into just a point along an infinite line. .
"The Flow of the River" and "The Great Deeps" discusses water and it's "magic." The essays seems to use water as somewhat of an unknown to man. In "The Flow of the River" the reader learns Eiseley is afraid of water due to a childhood experience. He talks of the river as treacherous and yet it, the water, is what brings life. He then talks about a frozen catfish he takes home that comes back to life with the aid of some heat. His relationship with the fish is to explain the connection between man and animals. "We were both projections out of that timeless ferment and locked as well in some greater unity that lay incalculably beyond us." Afterwards he discounts man as a divine creature that can never be outdone by another species. Again he shows that humans are limited and can be related to plain animals. "The Great Deeps" explains the experiences of Sir Charles Thompson and other scientist of that time. They were easily deceived by theories they wanted to be true. At the end the deep sea can be thought of as outer space; subsequently the theories of outer space might be disproved due to the lack of knowledge. .
"The Snout" tells of the first vertebrate to walk the earth from out of the water. This evolutionary teaching is used to show that the world did not start with humans. That even though we (humans) realized that the earth revolves around the sun, we still believe that we are at the center of life. "We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time." Eiseley is insisting that even though we can think of ourselves as the center of nature, we are definitely not. Our mind is great but it's not really that great.
