Rather than replace the modal methodology approach to writing with an aim or purpose-oriented pedagogy and criticism, it would be profitable for writing across the curriculum teachers to recycle the modes, using them as topics of generative and analytic invention. The move from mode to topic can be applied to the texts of contemporary science essayists, such as Loren Eiseley. There appear to be two rhetorical motives for Eiseley's reliance on the narratizing of science. First, Eiseley's complete dedication to the paleontologist's and anthropologist's inductive and deductive methods seems to be fraught with a writer's need to communicate, to transform the data and hypotheses gathered from his observations into ideas that the intelligent layperson might comprehend. The second motive locates itself in the space between Eiseley's fictionalized audience and the inductive/deductive methods he uses to observe, record, and interpret nature. Two needs are filled by these motives. His audiences are able to see wholes in parts, to relate fact and overall picture and arrive at new and more holistic senses of chronology, of species, and environment. The narrative impulse to know and express science in a more complete and more human way means to know and write as a scientist following a careful methodology, and, in storytelling, to make what has been learned understandable and significant to others. (Five notes are included, and 18 references are appended.) (MS)