Background

Edward Payson Evans was born in Remsen, Oneida County, New York, the son of Evan and Mary (Williams) Evans. His parents were natives of North Wales; his father was a Presbyterian minister.

Education

He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1854.

For three years he studied at the Universities of Gottingen, Berlin, and Munich, and in Germany he found his second mother country.

Career

After his graduation in 1854 from the University of Michigan, Evans acted for one year as principal of an academy at Hernando, Mississippi, taught languages for another year in Carroll College at Waukesha, Wisconsin, and then went to Europe. Returning in 1862 to the United States, he was appointed instructor in modern languages in the University of Michigan and promoted the next year to a professorship. His literary career began inconspicuously with translations of Adolf Stahr’s two-volume Life and Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1866) and Athanase Josué Coquerel’s First Historical Transformations of Christianity (1867), and with two text-books, an Abriss der Deutschen Literaturgeschichte and a Progressive German Reader (1869, 1870). In 1870 Evans resigned his professorship. A few months later he settled as a private scholar and free-lance journalist in his beloved Munich, and before long his high, broad forehead and flowing beard were a permanent feature of the Royal Library. He devoted himself at first to the study of Sanskrit, Zend, and modern Persian, published articles on Oriental literature, and was offered in 1873 the professorship of Sanskrit in the University of Lahore. An incessant student, he became learned in a half dozen subjects and more than well informed in a score, but his taste ran to the devious and the abstruse. Few heads in his generation could have held more, or more diverse, information than his; and the yeast of thought kept all his knowledge in a genial ferment. His articles on American subjects were gathered into two volumes of Beitrage sur Amerikanischen Literatur- tmd Kulturgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1898, 1903), but his best and most characteristic work is preserved in three fascinating volumes on Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture (1896), Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (1897), and Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1904). The first and third are erudite studies in medieval art and law. The second is one of those freaks of scholarship which brilliant but self-taught men produce from time to time; incredible as zoology, its stories of sagacious birds and beasts are delightful as literature. All three are written lucidly and vivaciously and bear the stamp of a highly original mind.

Achievements

• He wrote regularly for several German periodicals, especially for the Allgemeine Zeitung of Munich, whose staff he joined in 1884, and with less frequency for English and American magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Unitarian Review, and the Popular Science Monthly.

Works

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  • The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Animal symbolism in ecclesiastical architecture. by E. P. Evans.

    (High Quality FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION: :Evans, E. P. (Edwar...)

Connections

On May 23, 1868, he married Elizabeth Edson Gibson (March 8, 1832 - September 14, 1911), daughter of Willard Putnam and Lucia Field (Williams) Gibson.

Father:

Evan Evans.

Mother:

Mary (Williams) Evans

Wife:

Elizabeth Edson Gibson