Books: Caterpillars

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF NONSENSE (275 pp.)—Bergen Evans—Knopf ($3).

Sir Thomas Browne called them “vulgar errors.” Said Francis Bacon: “Men rest not in false apprehensions without absurd and inconsequent deductions.” As Essayist Logan Pearsall Smith put it, even the most lucid brains harbor “nests of woolly caterpillars.”

In this book, vigorous, witty Bergen Evans, youthful professor of English at Northwestern University, swoops down on many of the world’s best-beloved caterpillars’ nests. His aim is, of course, to exterminate them. Sample “vulgar errors”: >Thunder sours milk (the sultry weather is really responsible).

>Hairiness is a sign of manliness (modern scientists believe that baldness is actually more “masculine”).

>Lightning never strikes twice in the same place (the odds are definitely in favor of its doing so).

>Bulls are enraged by the color red (it is the waving material that they charge at in the ring).

>Equatorial climates provoke licentiousness (a supposition that fails to explain the inexhaustible virility of Eskimos).

>Fright can cause hair to turn white overnight (“it never seems to turn white over day”).

>Eunuchs are sexually incompetent (case histories sometimes prove otherwise).

Professor Evans roams far & wide in the age-old land of nonsense. He reminds his readers that generations of theologians debated the question of whether Adam and Eve had navels, and in the 18th Century were especially concerned over the exact location of Noah’s cabin on the Ark. He comes down hard on such promotional notions as “miraculous cures” (highly profitable to the yellow press), and has fun with the thousands who earnestly believe that a curse lies upon those who excavated the tomb of Tutankhamen (Mystery-Writer Edgar Wallace once noted ominously “that the very day the tomb was opened a cobra ate the chief explorer’s canary”).

One of man’s favorite ways of tormenting himself, the professor notes, is to consider himself lower than the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air—to see all animals as “furry little parables.” The noble stag, for example, is famed for his readiness to defend his trembling does; in fact, he always runs like hell and rejoins the ladies only when danger is past.

Occasionally, like most debunkers, Author Evans loses his sense of humor (as in his stern “exposure” of the egotism of mother birds). But in the main The Natural History of Nonsense is fit to turn the hair of a woolly caterpillar white overnight.