Natural Philosopher

By Peter Staler

KEITH COUNTY JOURNAL

by John Janovy Jr.

St. Martin's Press; 210 pages; $8.95

Even before publication, this journal had assumed a near legendary character. John Janovy Jr., a University of Nebraska parasitologist, was a literary unknown. His manuscript, which deals with such unprepossessing subjects as snails and the parasites that reside in their innards, arrived at the office unsolicited. Usually, such "over-the-transom" offerings are ignored. But something persuaded an editor to take a quick look at this one "just in case." The decision was the literary equivalent of finding a diamond in a stream bed.

Keith County Journal, a collection of essays about desolate Nebraska grasslands, has already invited comparison with such lapidary works as Lewis Thomas' Lives of a Cell and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book belongs in that company. Like Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand, Professor Janovy discerns universes in the creeks, bogs and fields of the Sandhills country. He makes the reader care for creatures as large as the great blue heron, as small as the inch-long plains killifish, and as obscure as the parasites of the genus Trich-odina that live in the minnow's gills. "Early on," writes Janovy, "the killifish was shown to be not a fish but a community, and the community itself encompasses both the artist and the laborer, both the classic and the romantic, both the ballerina and the boor." This could be misconstrued as mere anthropomorphism. But as Janovy proves, these creatures really do assume roles like those of the "civilized" community outside.

Indeed community, the way in which all inhabitants of Keith County order their lives to ensure one another's survival, provides the theme of Janovy's work. In each of his essays, which can be read as homilies, every living thing owes its continued existence to other creatures. Animals recognize this fact instinctively; man continues to ignore it at his peril.

Though this insight is urgent, the au thor never belabors it. Instead of preaching about interdependence, Janovy celebrates the simple delights of a naturalist: discovering a creek full of snails or a marsh full of flies, observing a colony of birds and musing that "the individual cliff swallow is the philosophical equivalent of a single cell of the multicellular colony-organism," realizing that every good biologist must also be a philosopher. "The biologist," he concludes, "approaches nature in the form of a plant or animal and immediately begins asking questions about the innermost soul, the innermost characteristics, the true spectrum as well as the immediate traits, of the living thing." Janovy cannot offer his readers conclusive answers. But as his jewel of a journal makes clear, he never fails to ask the right questions.

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