I’ve been trying to find this book, to no avail. Maybe someone here will recognize it.
It was a collection of scifi and/or fantasy short stories. The first story in the book was about this man who invents a new type of scope. I want to say he called it the omniscope, but I could be mistaken. Not only could this scope see through objects, it could also see back and forwards through time. So if you focused on a wasp, you could watch its every movement, and watch back through time, following it and its ancestors all the way back to the beginning creatures of the wasp.
Another story in the book had these people getting stranded on Mars. As the days pass, strange plants begin to grow wherever these people urinate, leave dead bodies, etc. Eventually, the people realize these plants are bio-engineered to be used by sentient beings as spacesuits, among other things.
I read this book back in the early 90s, but there’s a good chance it could have been published anywhere from the 60s on.
The second story is “In The Halls of the Martian Kings” by John Varley; the first is probably “I See You” by Damon Knight. The collection you read is probably one of the “Best of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine” collections (the 23rd collection in fact Publication: The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 23rd Series)
