In a column in the Illustrated London News in 1893 on the eerie effects of disturbing a Viking's bones, Andrew Lang begins:

Here, in a column that constituted much of Lang's wider reputation during the last decades of the nineteenth century, his position is a strange one. He is resisting the disenchanting effects of research, learning and investigation – against the main thrust of nineteenth-century intellectual culture – yet has set out his stall to this effect in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which his entry on ‘Apparitions’ first appeared in the ninth edition (1875–89). This edition quickly became known as ‘the scholar's edition’ and was critically praised for its rigour and learning. The ninth edition was seen as an exemplar of nineteenth-century scholarship – methodical, sceptical, ‘scientific’ – yet Lang used it, he says here, to defend ghosts from science.

As the work included in this volume shows, Lang's relations to the discourses of science reveal a shifting and seemingly paradoxical attitude. Over and over again in his work on myth, folklore, the origins of religion and psychical research, Lang destroys his opponents (and sometimes his allies) by a precise and assiduous concern for the primacy of scientific method. He castigates them for their poor attention to detail, their lack of logic and their woolly methods. Neither James Frazer nor Alfred Russel Wallace, neither Grant Allen nor Anatole France, are spared his steely eye for lapses in logic and the misuse of evidence. But, and with Lang there is often a ‘but’, so often he uses the methods of science to question what were becoming the fundamental assumptions of science.