Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson was one of those rare naturalists/philosophers who didn't lose their wonder when studying the natural world. In a series of short anecdotes and essays Watson brings out exactly this sense of wonder in the everyday organisms such as ants, wasps, beetles and people themselves.

He describes with loving detail and a real sense of the writer who knows how to write, given his talent for writing novels, the life of a butterfly in symbiotic communion with a particular species of ant. He shows how a man brought up in civilisation can become a natural part of the wild environment once he open his heart, not just his eyes. He tells of life in Fiji with the natives and their peculiar ways, the almost homecoming he experienced during his time with Australian Aborigines. This includes, the contraversial story, "Out There", about the harsh and very real story of a white ranch manager and his association with Aboriginal women. He talks of many places and times with a very wide knowledge not only in a literal sense but also as a man of experience of the natural, wild, places. His description of silence in a deep cavern is remarkable, or the presence of tree roots at a depth of 160 ft is astonising.

It is an eloquent book, even if it doesn't really, except on one or two occasions, really challange Darwinian evolutionary dogma as was intended, it is a book of great beauty and in addition to a very few, such as Adolf Portmann's "Animal Forms and Patterns" is not seen much anymore in serious biological circles. Most unfortunate as the hardline mechanistic paradigm holds on tenaciously.

Wonderful, wondrous.

E. L. Grant Watson has written some fascinating books. I had read his earlier book "Descent of Spirit" which was wonderfully well written with fluid poetical style and possessed both intimate personal experiences of the author in the wilds of northern Australia amongst the Aborigines but also had some very interesting facts regarding some symbiotic relationships between plants and animals and animals and animals. Assuming the current book to be an elaboration of his ideas in this regard I eagerly awaited its arrival. Unfortunately there was considerably less material than anticipated and far too many `flights of fancy' with little to back them up. There were some attempts at a fuller description in terms of the more solid ideas of Goethe (such as the use of the process of exact imaginative participation, unfortunately translated as exact imaginative fantasy, certainly not what Goethe had in mind) although one always felt the author did either not really understand these ideas or was not fully convinced of them and so remained in a kind of nebulous state surrounded by the ideas of other men in a hodge-podge conceptual jungle. There is of course no conclusions on offer or anything to get hold of BUT in his examples of the intricacies of the natural world, particularly the astonishing (to say the least) aspects involved in the `cooperation' between organisms, Grant-Watson brings forth a very important point in regards to the validity of a completely mechanistic evolutionary theory such as that of Neo-Darwinism. As such, this book is not to be dismissed and the salient points made as well as the writings of others, where mentioned, provide a valuable addition to the evaluation of a purely mechanistic theory of evolution.