Sometimes a snail isn't just a snail, but a mirror, a mystery, and something truly magnificent. Long ago, before half the stars that speckle the sky were born and the mountains rose up reaching for them, a giant ocean covered the Earth. One day, in that giant ocean, something strange happened: a change so mysterious and magnificent that it was given a special name: mutation. From this mutation, life was born from non-life--the first living creatures, tinier than a grain of sand, tinier than the tip of the eyelash of a mouse, came into being. Time tended to them kindly. Soon--which in cosmic time means millions and millions of years--they crawled out of the ocean and onto the land. Not knowing whether they would find a home there, some of these brave early explorers carried their homes on their backs. And so snails took to the Earth.

And then, one autumn afternoon a cosmic blink ago, a human--a retired scientist from the London's Natural History Museum--stopped mid-stride on his walk when he noticed a most unusual garden snail in a pile of compost. And so Jeremy and his story become a human story as well. Maria Popova has been writing about what she reads on the blog Brain Pickings since 2006, which is now included in the Library of Congress archive of culturally valuable materials. Ping Zhu is a freelance illustrator who has worked with clients big and small, won some awards based on the work she did for aforementioned clients, attracted new clients with shiny awards, and is hoping to maintain her livelihood in Brooklyn by repeating that cycle.