Research Paper on:
The Unexpected Universe by Loren Eiseley

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that is generally lost in most adults -- a sense of wonder. But by looking at the world through his eyes, the reader recaptures a sense of awe at the  wonder of the world. This point is well illustrated by two representative essays from this collection, "The Hidden Teacher" and "The Star Thrower." In "The Hidden Teacher," Eiseley writes  that we have the idea that we learn from teachers, "and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories" (49).  Eiseley also points out that these unexpected "teachers" are frequently hidden, so that we may not realize that teaching is going on when it happens, but, nevertheless, it does happen.  As an example, he goes on to describe what he learned from an unlikely teacher, a spider. Eiseley was in the West at the time, exploring a long  gulch while looking for fossils. He spotted a large, yellow-and-black orb spider, "whose web was moored to the tall spears of buffalo grass at the edge of the arroyo" (49).  The sight of the spider, so preoccupied with its web caused Eiseley to speculate on what would make a spiders perspective on the world. He pulled out a pencil and  gently touched a strand of the web. The spider immediately started checking lines in the web. The intrusion was unprecedented in the spiders experience, a distinct pull on the web,  but no prey. The spider was "circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe" and everything outside of that small universe was "irrational" and "extraneous" (50). This observation ignites  one of the flights of imagination that are characteristic of Eiseleys style. From the microcosm of the spider, Eiseley learns a "lesson" that he applies to the macrocosm of the