Bergen Evans, center. A seminal skeptic who was, inevitably, caught up in the nexus of Forteans.
Bergen Baldwin Evans was born 19 September 1904 in Franklin, Ohio. His father, Rice Kemper, was a doctor, the fourth generation in the family to practice; his mother was Louise Cass. They had six children, Bergen the third of them. When Bergen was about five, the family relocated to Sheffield, England, as his father had given up his work as a doctor to accept clerkship in the consular service. World War I and the poor salary had him send his children back to Ohio, where they lived with an aunt. At night and on Saturdays, Bergen worked in a paper mill. He was a bright child, educated at the local schools. He matriculated at Miami University (in Oxford Ohio) when he was 15.
A need to be the smartest guy in the room seems to have developed—according to his own reckoning—from his family situation. He later said, “I don’t know quite where my iconoclasm got its roots—possibly in the fact that my father and brother were both big guys, terribly athletic and physically self-reliant, definitely the do-it-yourself type, while I was a lie-by-the-fire, ten-thumbed mollycoddle. My only revenge was to hunt out some chinks in the armor of their assurance when they were arming for battle and drop a few chiggers in. Then, by extension, to all the dogmatic and assured.”
Bergen Baldwin Evans was born 19 September 1904 in Franklin, Ohio. His father, Rice Kemper, was a doctor, the fourth generation in the family to practice; his mother was Louise Cass. They had six children, Bergen the third of them. When Bergen was about five, the family relocated to Sheffield, England, as his father had given up his work as a doctor to accept clerkship in the consular service. World War I and the poor salary had him send his children back to Ohio, where they lived with an aunt. At night and on Saturdays, Bergen worked in a paper mill. He was a bright child, educated at the local schools. He matriculated at Miami University (in Oxford Ohio) when he was 15.
A need to be the smartest guy in the room seems to have developed—according to his own reckoning—from his family situation. He later said, “I don’t know quite where my iconoclasm got its roots—possibly in the fact that my father and brother were both big guys, terribly athletic and physically self-reliant, definitely the do-it-yourself type, while I was a lie-by-the-fire, ten-thumbed mollycoddle. My only revenge was to hunt out some chinks in the armor of their assurance when they were arming for battle and drop a few chiggers in. Then, by extension, to all the dogmatic and assured.”
According to one biography that I have seen, he was almost dismissed his first year because of his unorthodox study habits—I am not sure what that means, exactly. He worked in a restaurant to make ends meet, and drew cartoons for a newspaper. He moved to Harvard to take and M.A. in English, which he received in 1925, and then returned to Miami University where he taught English until 192. A Rhodes Scholarship had him at Oxford University from 1929 to 1931. (he also spent time in Italy during 1930, at least.) He received a B.Litt. in 1930, and returned to Harvard where he received his Ph.D. in philology in 1932. His dissertation was on Samuel Johnson as a biographer.
Afterwards, Evans decamped in the Midwest, where he would remain for the rest of his life. In September 1932 he joined Northwestern University in the English Department. He was an extremely popular instructor, especially his introduction to literature. Famously uninterested in hobbies pr vacations, he added to his work, not only teaching but writing, too, short stories and reviews and articles. In 1936 he edited a book for Little, Brown, “Fifty Essays.” That year he also became Assistant Professor. Three years on, he became Associate Professor and, in August, married Jean Whinery. They would have two sons. It was a good year for him, 1939, as he also won the Scribner Award for his short-story writing.
He fell into book writing in the early 1940s. While teaching at Northwestern’s evening division he met a student named Herman Bishop, who was a mechanic. They co-authored the 1942 book, “Your Car is Made to Last,” an early repair manual. His second book was also co-authored. It came out in 1944, the same year he made full professor at Northwestern. With G. J. Mohr—presumably a psychiatrist—he co-authored “The Psychiatry of Robert Burton.” I have not seen it, but reportedly the book attempted to measure how well Robert Burton, author of the 17th-century classic “Anatomy of Melancholy” understood modern concepts of psychiatry. The attempt to measure ideas against modern forms of scientific knowledge—or, more precisely, then-contemporary forms of science—indicated what would become a major theme in Evans’s writing life.
Over the years, apparently, Evans had been collecting notes—how Fortean!—on myths, superstitions, and so-called old wives’s tales. Like he did with Burton’s writings, these he measured against contemporary scientific ideas and found wanting. He compiled these thoughts for a 1946 book, “The Natural History of Nonsense.” In Evans’s obituary, the New York Times called it “a brittle mockery of popular superstitions and misconnections.” This was a seminal work in what would become 20th-century America’s skeptical movement, which would bloom especially in the 1970s with CSICOP and Skeptical Inquirer. The skeptic Daniel Loxton has argued that there is no beginning to the skeptical movement, that the tradition stretches uninterrupted from Greek philosophers to the modern movement. But, of course, such a view is more of a rhetorical trick, downplaying differences to increase the movement’s prestige. There are substantive changes, and Evans’s book stands as an important marker.
A later critic called Evans “an amusing but superficial writer” and this characterizes his next period—a run of columns at “The American Mercury” between 1947 and 1950. (A more positive way of making the same point about Evans’s personality was to say, as one friend did, that he “never lets his erudition get in the way of his sense of humor.”) Evans’s column was titled “The Skeptics Corner” and concerned further disproving of myths and misconceptions. “The American Mercury,” fittingly enough, had been made famous by H. L. Mencken, an opponent of Charles Fort and standard-bearer for scientific thought against common prejudices. Mencken considered himself a skeptic, which at the time strongly connoted objection to religious belief. He was also considered, with his cohort, a debunker—a term that came into use in 1923 and signified the removing of bunk from ideas. At the time that Evans was with the magazine, it was undergoing something of a renascence; it was being published by Lawrence Spivak (who would also be instrumental in putting out the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by the Fortean Anthony Boucher), and Mencken contributed pieces to the American Mercury.
All told, Evans wrote 34 columns for The American Mercury. Some of these were repeats, and some made use of material from his book. The column ran the gamut. Some showcased a liberal sensibility. He dismissed the idea that there was much philandering in Catholic confessionals, that there was a plague of criminally-minded marijuana users, that confessions were proof of guilt, that women were dumb, that blacks were naturally happier and entranced by spirituals—Evans was an integrationist in life, inviting a black professor to the faculty club before such things were done—that non-Europeans were warlike heathens, that one-room schoolhouses taught better than modern facilities, that the electric chair was humane, and that homosexuals were innately effeminate. Other columns debunked so-called old wives’ tales—though without an abundance of evidence, mostly relying on assertion and a quote from an expert. Thus, there was no such thing as higher and lower animals; Old Testament dietary restrictions were not based in hygiene; appendicitis was not caused by eating seeds, and diet pills did not contain tapeworms; taste is not a guide to whether food is safe, nor can silver show whether a mushroom is poisonous or not.
This last category of columns—disproving common beliefs—overlapped with another group, one that took on obvious subjects. Yes, pigs can swim, he said, and, no, winters did not used to be colder. It’s ok to keep plants in the bedroom at night—indeed, night air is not unhealthy. China and India are not densely populated. Birds do not sense the weather and porcupines cannot shoot their quills. Snakes do not swallow their young to protect them. Nero did not fiddle as Rome burned. Walking early does not cause bowleggedness in children. Human nature is not unchangeable. Hair does not turn white overnight. The Fascists did not make the trains run on time--he was in Italy and knew this from experience, he said. He also tipped his hat to Mencken, saying that Millard Fillmore had not introduced the bathtub—this was a hoax that Mencken had cooked up for the “New York Evening Mail” in 1917.
Other columns were just odd. He wanted people to know that ground glass was not a poison: it just killed by lacerations. People do not read at-sight, just very fast. Diogenes did not really look for an honest man—which seems a particularly literal interpretation for an English major. Insomnia, he insisted, was not a disease. Based on his own observations, he dismissed the idea the college coeds were sexually adventurous, which seems a weak kind of evidence. He would also set up and knock down straw men: thus people fear bats getting tangled in their hair because they might contract bedbugs, but bats do not have bedbugs. He was certain that dying people do not see their lives pass before their eyes, and that no one was ever buried alive in a trance. South America, he declaimed, was not the land of opportunity. Americans are not the best fed people, he said. Based on a single article, he knew it to be the citizens of New Zealand. It was wrong to say that children slid down banisters, because what they really did was slide down handrails. The sun cannot start fires he said—there needs to be some aid, like a magnifying glass.
Others seems almost wrong. There are no human hermaphrodites, he said, because in no case do both types of gonadal tissue function properly—which is true but only by ignoring the demotic understanding of hermaphrodite. Eating fish was not good for the brain he said, and canned food could actually be kept in its original can after opening which are controversial statements at best, and not as clear-cut as he insisted. Foxes, he continued, are not smart—it depends, one would think, on how intelligence is defined—and lions do not dislike captivity, as proved by their longevity when kept in cages (which finesses whether they really like their lives). Man’s best friend is not the dog, he said, a weird nit to pick, and his conclusion was based on the fact that some dogs are dangerous. Humans do not have a right to their own opinions. A positive Wasserman test is not proof of syphilis, since there are false positives. The problem with faith healing is not that the cure does not work, but that faith does not. Thicker glass does not necessarily last longer. Exercise does not rest the mind. Napoleon’s army was not destroyed in Russia, he says, and offers as evidence that most of the soldiers died from illness not exposure, which seems a non sequitur.
One way of reading Evans is that he wanted to be the smartest person in the room. Thus, he would quibble over niggling details and interpret common phrases technically. But while this seems to be true, it isn’t the most important way of interpreting his work. He was also pushing the meaning of skepticism in new directions, following in Mencken’s footsteps. Skepticism had mostly been associated with religious disbelief since the middle of the nineteenth-century. Mencken had made debunking not only opposed to religious teaching, but also consonant with the products of scientific research. Evans was doing the same for skepticism. It retained some old associations: though Evans was not as anti-religious as Mencken had been, his attacks on old wives’s tales was also figured as an attack on popular superstition, which is, of course, linked to religious supernaturalism. But he was also defining skeptical positions as consistent with scientific authority.
In 1957, Evans co-produced “A Dictionary of American Usage,” which was not as descriptivist as its title might suggest. The entry on “skeptic” suggests how Evans saw himself. It took a relatively soft stance toward religion, beginning “is not to be confused with disbeliever” and, later, “as applied to religion, a skeptic is one who doubts the truth of the Christian religion or of important elements of it. He does not deny absolutely the truth of Christianity, as does the disbeliever.” There were, he admitted, instances of absolute skepticism—“In philosophy,” he concluded, the Skeptic (capitalized) is one who doubts or questions the possibility of real knowledge of any kind.” The meat of the entry made clear that Evans eschewed this kind of absolutism. He wrote, “Actually, a skeptic is one who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be knowledge, one who maintains a doubting attitude.” The word purporting is doing a lot of work in the definition, for he otherwise defines science (as opposed to art) as “knowledge.” (Art is action.) Thus, a lower-case skeptic is one who uses true knowledge—science—to doubt purported knowledge—everything else, including religion, without simply dismissing religion. He compared a skeptic to an agnostic, which he limned as “one who felt that the ultimate nature of things, including the existence of God, is unknown and probably unknowable.” Philosophically, then—to use his terms—he was an agnostic, not doubting ultimate explanations, but bracketing them as unknowable, and focusing on what could be explained factually. It is a formulation that would be influential, though not copied entirely.
Martin Gardner, for one, would follow in Evans’s steps, though the lines of influence are hard to known exactly, and there were differences between them. Gardner’s 1953 book, “In the Name of Science,” even more than Evans’s book, kicked off the modern skeptical movement. For Gardner, the skeptics’s view was co-extensive with the scientists—hence the title of his book—and yet there was room for religion, too, and Gardner himself was a Christian. Evans blurbed Gardner’s book, “I have read the book with profit and pleasure” and Gardner reviewed Evans’s next book, a sequel of sorts, “The Spoor of Spooks” (which incorporated some of the material from his column). Gardner appreciated Evans’s sense of humor, refusing to take seriously the objects of his study. He was impressed, too, by Evans’s range, though even he stopped short at some of Evans’s more extravagant extensions of skepticism—somehow America’s love affair with cars came into his sites, not as a myth to be debunked—Evans believed Americans loved their cars—but he did not approve of how much they did so. He thought it a popular delusion.
By this point, Evans was fifty and had just gotten bifocals. He was on leave, working on the dictionary (with his sister) and contemplating another book, further down the road: “tentatively entitled ‘The Moral Vertebrates,’ an examination of the attempt to support teleology from folk zoology.” (Which, by the way, sounds fascinating.) He was also involved with television, in a number of forms, hosting the panel show “of Many Things” and “Down You Go.” Later, he was on “The Last Word” (for which he won a Peabody) and was associated with “the $64,000 Question.” His start had come in 1949, when he appeared on Mike Wallace’s Chicago show “Majority Rule.” Perhaps it was these duties that kept him from finishing his book on folk zoology.
He and Cornelia, his sister, did eventually finish the dictionary, which was published by Random House. That was followed, in 1962, by “Comfortable Words,” also a Random House product and illustrated by Tomi Ungerer. The following year saw Random House publishing his third book for them, “The Word-A-Day Vocabulary Builder.” More dictionaries followed, 1968’s “Dictionary of Quotations” and 1970’s “Dictionary of Mythology, Mostly Classical.” He retired from teaching in 1974, the year that he turned 70.
He died 4 February 1978, aged 73.
************
Evans as connected to Forteanism—but was an anti-Fortean. He seems to have come across Fort in researching common myths and superstitions, and mentioned him—albeit briefly—in both “The Natural History of Nonsense” and a column for the “American Mercury” that largely recapitulated that section of the book. The immediate topic was the one probably most closely associated with Fort: strange rains.
He wrote, in “Natural History”:
“The little fishes that come down in heavy storms are one of the most delightful and persistent of meteorological myths. Generous narrators sometimes throw in a few frogs for good measure, and enthusiasts have added worms, snails, mussels, snakes, turtles, and even ‘a whole calf.’ One at least has claimed that it has rained milk which ‘the vehement heat of the sun’ draws up from the udders of the cattle. Possibly to feed the calf.
“Mr. Charles Fort, who seemingly devoted his entire life to collecting ‘authentic’ instances of bizarre downpours, was of the opinion that far stranger things than calves and milk have rained down. In addition to a dozen species of fish and reptiles his records include fungi, stones (with and without inscriptions), formless masses of protoplasm, hatchets, masks, and "the ceremonial regalia" of savages.”
That was the extent of his mentioning to Fort, though the section continued, and Fort could be found in the footnotes. Most of the discussion consisted of descriptions, with some attempts at organizing them. (He said ten times as many accounts come from India.) He then went on to poke holes in the explanations—usually, he said, one of two are offered, either that rains brings out frogs or that waterspouts pick up fish from the water and drop them on land. He dismisses the first as “an embarrassed apology for mendacity.” The second he acknowledges is believed by an expert, Dr. E. W. Gudger of the American Museum of Natural History, who wrote a couple of articles on the matter; but he doubts the case anyway, pointing out that many fish-falls occur far inland, away from bodies of water that could be the source. Gudger’s point does give Evans pause, though, and he admits that it would be “dogmatic to deny it flatly” but also pointed out that no trained observer has ever seen such a case, and continued his doubt.
Rather, Evans suggested, there were cultural reasons such beliefs persisted. They were a kind of evidence for spontaneous generation and could be used as proof of the Biblical description of the waters above the earth. (Other Fortean icons had come out in favor of the idea of the earth being surrounded by water.) These are certainly possibilities, but the evidence that Evans adduced in support of them was all old, and so he was forced to say that they were remnants of superstition, persisting for no obvious reason. It wasn’t much, and others of scientific bent would continue to insist that such falls really did happen and were not just superstitions.
The Fortean Society noticed the book shortly after it was published—not a surprise, since a chapter, including the bit on fish falls, appeared in “The Atlantic Monthly.” Tiffany Thayer prepared a review—that seems to have been scathing—for “Pathfinder,” a general interest magazine. He reported in Doubt 16, however, that it would not run “as written.” There was not further explanation, but likely Thayer made intemperate remarks and refused to have them edited out. He ended up shrugging his shoulders at the whole imbroglio—the book were sour grapes, anyway: the book was hardly worth noticing, he wrote in Doubt, except that it had brought to his attention the work of Dr. Gudger, who offered a kind of support for Fortean theorizing.
The book was lost down the memory hole—a damned fact, in its own way—for a few years until thought of it was probably refreshed by Evans’s column in “American Mercury.” In January 1951 (Doubt 31), Thayer continued compiling a bibliography of books that mentioned Fort, and included in the list Evans’s tome, but without any annotations.
It was not much of a connection, the one between Evans, Fort, and the Fortean Society, but it was indicative of changes in the skeptical movement that would soon enough rule Forteanism outside the bounds of skepticism—even as Thayer insisted Fort and his Society were keeping alight Diogenes’s lamp.
Afterwards, Evans decamped in the Midwest, where he would remain for the rest of his life. In September 1932 he joined Northwestern University in the English Department. He was an extremely popular instructor, especially his introduction to literature. Famously uninterested in hobbies pr vacations, he added to his work, not only teaching but writing, too, short stories and reviews and articles. In 1936 he edited a book for Little, Brown, “Fifty Essays.” That year he also became Assistant Professor. Three years on, he became Associate Professor and, in August, married Jean Whinery. They would have two sons. It was a good year for him, 1939, as he also won the Scribner Award for his short-story writing.
He fell into book writing in the early 1940s. While teaching at Northwestern’s evening division he met a student named Herman Bishop, who was a mechanic. They co-authored the 1942 book, “Your Car is Made to Last,” an early repair manual. His second book was also co-authored. It came out in 1944, the same year he made full professor at Northwestern. With G. J. Mohr—presumably a psychiatrist—he co-authored “The Psychiatry of Robert Burton.” I have not seen it, but reportedly the book attempted to measure how well Robert Burton, author of the 17th-century classic “Anatomy of Melancholy” understood modern concepts of psychiatry. The attempt to measure ideas against modern forms of scientific knowledge—or, more precisely, then-contemporary forms of science—indicated what would become a major theme in Evans’s writing life.
Over the years, apparently, Evans had been collecting notes—how Fortean!—on myths, superstitions, and so-called old wives’s tales. Like he did with Burton’s writings, these he measured against contemporary scientific ideas and found wanting. He compiled these thoughts for a 1946 book, “The Natural History of Nonsense.” In Evans’s obituary, the New York Times called it “a brittle mockery of popular superstitions and misconnections.” This was a seminal work in what would become 20th-century America’s skeptical movement, which would bloom especially in the 1970s with CSICOP and Skeptical Inquirer. The skeptic Daniel Loxton has argued that there is no beginning to the skeptical movement, that the tradition stretches uninterrupted from Greek philosophers to the modern movement. But, of course, such a view is more of a rhetorical trick, downplaying differences to increase the movement’s prestige. There are substantive changes, and Evans’s book stands as an important marker.
A later critic called Evans “an amusing but superficial writer” and this characterizes his next period—a run of columns at “The American Mercury” between 1947 and 1950. (A more positive way of making the same point about Evans’s personality was to say, as one friend did, that he “never lets his erudition get in the way of his sense of humor.”) Evans’s column was titled “The Skeptics Corner” and concerned further disproving of myths and misconceptions. “The American Mercury,” fittingly enough, had been made famous by H. L. Mencken, an opponent of Charles Fort and standard-bearer for scientific thought against common prejudices. Mencken considered himself a skeptic, which at the time strongly connoted objection to religious belief. He was also considered, with his cohort, a debunker—a term that came into use in 1923 and signified the removing of bunk from ideas. At the time that Evans was with the magazine, it was undergoing something of a renascence; it was being published by Lawrence Spivak (who would also be instrumental in putting out the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by the Fortean Anthony Boucher), and Mencken contributed pieces to the American Mercury.
All told, Evans wrote 34 columns for The American Mercury. Some of these were repeats, and some made use of material from his book. The column ran the gamut. Some showcased a liberal sensibility. He dismissed the idea that there was much philandering in Catholic confessionals, that there was a plague of criminally-minded marijuana users, that confessions were proof of guilt, that women were dumb, that blacks were naturally happier and entranced by spirituals—Evans was an integrationist in life, inviting a black professor to the faculty club before such things were done—that non-Europeans were warlike heathens, that one-room schoolhouses taught better than modern facilities, that the electric chair was humane, and that homosexuals were innately effeminate. Other columns debunked so-called old wives’ tales—though without an abundance of evidence, mostly relying on assertion and a quote from an expert. Thus, there was no such thing as higher and lower animals; Old Testament dietary restrictions were not based in hygiene; appendicitis was not caused by eating seeds, and diet pills did not contain tapeworms; taste is not a guide to whether food is safe, nor can silver show whether a mushroom is poisonous or not.
This last category of columns—disproving common beliefs—overlapped with another group, one that took on obvious subjects. Yes, pigs can swim, he said, and, no, winters did not used to be colder. It’s ok to keep plants in the bedroom at night—indeed, night air is not unhealthy. China and India are not densely populated. Birds do not sense the weather and porcupines cannot shoot their quills. Snakes do not swallow their young to protect them. Nero did not fiddle as Rome burned. Walking early does not cause bowleggedness in children. Human nature is not unchangeable. Hair does not turn white overnight. The Fascists did not make the trains run on time--he was in Italy and knew this from experience, he said. He also tipped his hat to Mencken, saying that Millard Fillmore had not introduced the bathtub—this was a hoax that Mencken had cooked up for the “New York Evening Mail” in 1917.
Other columns were just odd. He wanted people to know that ground glass was not a poison: it just killed by lacerations. People do not read at-sight, just very fast. Diogenes did not really look for an honest man—which seems a particularly literal interpretation for an English major. Insomnia, he insisted, was not a disease. Based on his own observations, he dismissed the idea the college coeds were sexually adventurous, which seems a weak kind of evidence. He would also set up and knock down straw men: thus people fear bats getting tangled in their hair because they might contract bedbugs, but bats do not have bedbugs. He was certain that dying people do not see their lives pass before their eyes, and that no one was ever buried alive in a trance. South America, he declaimed, was not the land of opportunity. Americans are not the best fed people, he said. Based on a single article, he knew it to be the citizens of New Zealand. It was wrong to say that children slid down banisters, because what they really did was slide down handrails. The sun cannot start fires he said—there needs to be some aid, like a magnifying glass.
Others seems almost wrong. There are no human hermaphrodites, he said, because in no case do both types of gonadal tissue function properly—which is true but only by ignoring the demotic understanding of hermaphrodite. Eating fish was not good for the brain he said, and canned food could actually be kept in its original can after opening which are controversial statements at best, and not as clear-cut as he insisted. Foxes, he continued, are not smart—it depends, one would think, on how intelligence is defined—and lions do not dislike captivity, as proved by their longevity when kept in cages (which finesses whether they really like their lives). Man’s best friend is not the dog, he said, a weird nit to pick, and his conclusion was based on the fact that some dogs are dangerous. Humans do not have a right to their own opinions. A positive Wasserman test is not proof of syphilis, since there are false positives. The problem with faith healing is not that the cure does not work, but that faith does not. Thicker glass does not necessarily last longer. Exercise does not rest the mind. Napoleon’s army was not destroyed in Russia, he says, and offers as evidence that most of the soldiers died from illness not exposure, which seems a non sequitur.
One way of reading Evans is that he wanted to be the smartest person in the room. Thus, he would quibble over niggling details and interpret common phrases technically. But while this seems to be true, it isn’t the most important way of interpreting his work. He was also pushing the meaning of skepticism in new directions, following in Mencken’s footsteps. Skepticism had mostly been associated with religious disbelief since the middle of the nineteenth-century. Mencken had made debunking not only opposed to religious teaching, but also consonant with the products of scientific research. Evans was doing the same for skepticism. It retained some old associations: though Evans was not as anti-religious as Mencken had been, his attacks on old wives’s tales was also figured as an attack on popular superstition, which is, of course, linked to religious supernaturalism. But he was also defining skeptical positions as consistent with scientific authority.
In 1957, Evans co-produced “A Dictionary of American Usage,” which was not as descriptivist as its title might suggest. The entry on “skeptic” suggests how Evans saw himself. It took a relatively soft stance toward religion, beginning “is not to be confused with disbeliever” and, later, “as applied to religion, a skeptic is one who doubts the truth of the Christian religion or of important elements of it. He does not deny absolutely the truth of Christianity, as does the disbeliever.” There were, he admitted, instances of absolute skepticism—“In philosophy,” he concluded, the Skeptic (capitalized) is one who doubts or questions the possibility of real knowledge of any kind.” The meat of the entry made clear that Evans eschewed this kind of absolutism. He wrote, “Actually, a skeptic is one who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be knowledge, one who maintains a doubting attitude.” The word purporting is doing a lot of work in the definition, for he otherwise defines science (as opposed to art) as “knowledge.” (Art is action.) Thus, a lower-case skeptic is one who uses true knowledge—science—to doubt purported knowledge—everything else, including religion, without simply dismissing religion. He compared a skeptic to an agnostic, which he limned as “one who felt that the ultimate nature of things, including the existence of God, is unknown and probably unknowable.” Philosophically, then—to use his terms—he was an agnostic, not doubting ultimate explanations, but bracketing them as unknowable, and focusing on what could be explained factually. It is a formulation that would be influential, though not copied entirely.
Martin Gardner, for one, would follow in Evans’s steps, though the lines of influence are hard to known exactly, and there were differences between them. Gardner’s 1953 book, “In the Name of Science,” even more than Evans’s book, kicked off the modern skeptical movement. For Gardner, the skeptics’s view was co-extensive with the scientists—hence the title of his book—and yet there was room for religion, too, and Gardner himself was a Christian. Evans blurbed Gardner’s book, “I have read the book with profit and pleasure” and Gardner reviewed Evans’s next book, a sequel of sorts, “The Spoor of Spooks” (which incorporated some of the material from his column). Gardner appreciated Evans’s sense of humor, refusing to take seriously the objects of his study. He was impressed, too, by Evans’s range, though even he stopped short at some of Evans’s more extravagant extensions of skepticism—somehow America’s love affair with cars came into his sites, not as a myth to be debunked—Evans believed Americans loved their cars—but he did not approve of how much they did so. He thought it a popular delusion.
By this point, Evans was fifty and had just gotten bifocals. He was on leave, working on the dictionary (with his sister) and contemplating another book, further down the road: “tentatively entitled ‘The Moral Vertebrates,’ an examination of the attempt to support teleology from folk zoology.” (Which, by the way, sounds fascinating.) He was also involved with television, in a number of forms, hosting the panel show “of Many Things” and “Down You Go.” Later, he was on “The Last Word” (for which he won a Peabody) and was associated with “the $64,000 Question.” His start had come in 1949, when he appeared on Mike Wallace’s Chicago show “Majority Rule.” Perhaps it was these duties that kept him from finishing his book on folk zoology.
He and Cornelia, his sister, did eventually finish the dictionary, which was published by Random House. That was followed, in 1962, by “Comfortable Words,” also a Random House product and illustrated by Tomi Ungerer. The following year saw Random House publishing his third book for them, “The Word-A-Day Vocabulary Builder.” More dictionaries followed, 1968’s “Dictionary of Quotations” and 1970’s “Dictionary of Mythology, Mostly Classical.” He retired from teaching in 1974, the year that he turned 70.
He died 4 February 1978, aged 73.
************
Evans as connected to Forteanism—but was an anti-Fortean. He seems to have come across Fort in researching common myths and superstitions, and mentioned him—albeit briefly—in both “The Natural History of Nonsense” and a column for the “American Mercury” that largely recapitulated that section of the book. The immediate topic was the one probably most closely associated with Fort: strange rains.
He wrote, in “Natural History”:
“The little fishes that come down in heavy storms are one of the most delightful and persistent of meteorological myths. Generous narrators sometimes throw in a few frogs for good measure, and enthusiasts have added worms, snails, mussels, snakes, turtles, and even ‘a whole calf.’ One at least has claimed that it has rained milk which ‘the vehement heat of the sun’ draws up from the udders of the cattle. Possibly to feed the calf.
“Mr. Charles Fort, who seemingly devoted his entire life to collecting ‘authentic’ instances of bizarre downpours, was of the opinion that far stranger things than calves and milk have rained down. In addition to a dozen species of fish and reptiles his records include fungi, stones (with and without inscriptions), formless masses of protoplasm, hatchets, masks, and "the ceremonial regalia" of savages.”
That was the extent of his mentioning to Fort, though the section continued, and Fort could be found in the footnotes. Most of the discussion consisted of descriptions, with some attempts at organizing them. (He said ten times as many accounts come from India.) He then went on to poke holes in the explanations—usually, he said, one of two are offered, either that rains brings out frogs or that waterspouts pick up fish from the water and drop them on land. He dismisses the first as “an embarrassed apology for mendacity.” The second he acknowledges is believed by an expert, Dr. E. W. Gudger of the American Museum of Natural History, who wrote a couple of articles on the matter; but he doubts the case anyway, pointing out that many fish-falls occur far inland, away from bodies of water that could be the source. Gudger’s point does give Evans pause, though, and he admits that it would be “dogmatic to deny it flatly” but also pointed out that no trained observer has ever seen such a case, and continued his doubt.
Rather, Evans suggested, there were cultural reasons such beliefs persisted. They were a kind of evidence for spontaneous generation and could be used as proof of the Biblical description of the waters above the earth. (Other Fortean icons had come out in favor of the idea of the earth being surrounded by water.) These are certainly possibilities, but the evidence that Evans adduced in support of them was all old, and so he was forced to say that they were remnants of superstition, persisting for no obvious reason. It wasn’t much, and others of scientific bent would continue to insist that such falls really did happen and were not just superstitions.
The Fortean Society noticed the book shortly after it was published—not a surprise, since a chapter, including the bit on fish falls, appeared in “The Atlantic Monthly.” Tiffany Thayer prepared a review—that seems to have been scathing—for “Pathfinder,” a general interest magazine. He reported in Doubt 16, however, that it would not run “as written.” There was not further explanation, but likely Thayer made intemperate remarks and refused to have them edited out. He ended up shrugging his shoulders at the whole imbroglio—the book were sour grapes, anyway: the book was hardly worth noticing, he wrote in Doubt, except that it had brought to his attention the work of Dr. Gudger, who offered a kind of support for Fortean theorizing.
The book was lost down the memory hole—a damned fact, in its own way—for a few years until thought of it was probably refreshed by Evans’s column in “American Mercury.” In January 1951 (Doubt 31), Thayer continued compiling a bibliography of books that mentioned Fort, and included in the list Evans’s tome, but without any annotations.
It was not much of a connection, the one between Evans, Fort, and the Fortean Society, but it was indicative of changes in the skeptical movement that would soon enough rule Forteanism outside the bounds of skepticism—even as Thayer insisted Fort and his Society were keeping alight Diogenes’s lamp.
