Rorter Notices
IT is a moot point whether Mr. Evans is a public benefactor or not. If fact is inherently and intrinsically better than fiction then no doubt he is ; for his 260 pages are devoted to exploding assiduously and relentlessly all the fictions we imbibed at our mother's knee or in our childhood's reading. Doesn't quicklime destroy a dead body? Isn't a murderer photographed in his victim's dead eyes? All nonsense, declares Mr. Evans. Don't wolves, or sharks for that matter, eat men? All nonsense, declares Mr. Evans. Can't infants be heard to cry before they are born? All nonsense, declares Mr. Evans (though in the brief time since his book appeared a countryman of his own, a Cincinnati doctor, has affirmed that he heard one). And so on. Illusion after illusion shattered till a man may come to doubt his own existence. Even the conviction that fish is good for brain-workers goes ; it may be due, says Mr. Evans, to an association of fish diet, on Fridays at any rate, with the clergy —the implication apparently being that the association is fatal to the conviction. This is a most stimulating work, from its first chapter, on whether Adam and Eve should be depicted with navels (answer obvious) to its last on man's irrationality generally. Mr. Evans has provided an infallible cure for credulity and furnished con- siderable food for thought. For if we have implicitly accepted all the fallacies he stigmatises what about all the others he has no room to stigmatise?
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