Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (17 page)
Authors: David Standish
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BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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Two other related concepts also played a part in mid-nineteenth-century geological controversies: progressivism and directionalism. Progressivism meant what it suggests, that there is an observable
progress
in the geologic record, an upward march of creatures from lower to higher, culminating with man at the pinnacle. This was both in keeping with the spirit of the times—all sorts of progressive social measures were afoot—as well as being in harmony with religious ideas of a Divine Plan. Progressivism found metaphysical purpose in geological events. Directionalism was a scientific expression of the biblical idea, going back to the work of Burnet and others, that the earth is in a state of decline from an earlier perfection; it held that the major geologic processes were weakening over time, an attenuation caused by the continued cooling of the earth. Both these ideas were embraced by the catastrophists but dismissed by Lyell and his uniformitarian followers, Darwin among them.
progress
in the geologic record, an upward march of creatures from lower to higher, culminating with man at the pinnacle. This was both in keeping with the spirit of the times—all sorts of progressive social measures were afoot—as well as being in harmony with religious ideas of a Divine Plan. Progressivism found metaphysical purpose in geological events. Directionalism was a scientific expression of the biblical idea, going back to the work of Burnet and others, that the earth is in a state of decline from an earlier perfection; it held that the major geologic processes were weakening over time, an attenuation caused by the continued cooling of the earth. Both these ideas were embraced by the catastrophists but dismissed by Lyell and his uniformitarian followers, Darwin among them.
Understanding of geology was proceeding by leaps, but even in the 1860s when Verne was writing, deep disagreements continued regarding basic ideas, with neptunists, plutonists, catastrophists, uniformitarians, nonevolutionists, evolutionists, scriptural geologists, and atheists all slugging it out. So where did Verne fit into all of this?
His take on these issues is a little surprising.
Early on in the novel he establishes Professor Lidenbrock as a world-class scientist, hobnobbing with the great and the near great: “Humphrey Davy, Humboldt, Captain Franklin, and General Sabine never failed to call on him when passing through Hamburg; and Becquerel, Ebelman, Brewster, Dumas, Milne-Edwards, and Sainte-Claire Deville frequently consulted him about the most difficult problems in chemistry.”
Some of these savants we’ve encountered before. The first two—Davy and Humboldt—were both invoked by Symmes to be his “protectors” in his 1818 circular. Davy (1778–1829) was a British chemist who first suggested that chemical compounds are held together by an electrical force, becoming the first to isolate pure potassium and sodium from their compounds by zapping them with electricity. Also interested in geology, he was a founder in 1807 of the Geological Society of London. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was a German explorer and geographer who had roamed much of Central and South America and then turned his attention to questions of the earth’s magnetism and worked on his monumental
Kosmos,
his attempt at a
summa
of all known science. Captain Franklin (1786–1847) was the famous polar explorer whose disappearance caused such a scuffle. The others are less remembered today. Sir Edward Sabine (1788–1883), part of the Ross/Parry arctic expedition of 1818-1820, made notable studies of the earth’s magnetic field. The Becquerel family produced several generations of prominent physicists. Jacques-Joseph Ebelman (1814–1852) was a French chemist, Sir David Brewster (1781–1868) a Scottish physicist who studied optics and invented the kaleidoscope, Jean-Baptiste Andre Dumas (1800–1884) a pioneering French organic chemist, Henri Milne-Edwards (1800–1885) a French naturalist who was a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris when Verne was writing, and Sainte-Claire Deville (1818–1881) a French chemist who developed the first commercially viable process for producing aluminum—a lightweight metal Verne would find many inventive uses for in his novels.
Kosmos,
his attempt at a
summa
of all known science. Captain Franklin (1786–1847) was the famous polar explorer whose disappearance caused such a scuffle. The others are less remembered today. Sir Edward Sabine (1788–1883), part of the Ross/Parry arctic expedition of 1818-1820, made notable studies of the earth’s magnetic field. The Becquerel family produced several generations of prominent physicists. Jacques-Joseph Ebelman (1814–1852) was a French chemist, Sir David Brewster (1781–1868) a Scottish physicist who studied optics and invented the kaleidoscope, Jean-Baptiste Andre Dumas (1800–1884) a pioneering French organic chemist, Henri Milne-Edwards (1800–1885) a French naturalist who was a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris when Verne was writing, and Sainte-Claire Deville (1818–1881) a French chemist who developed the first commercially viable process for producing aluminum—a lightweight metal Verne would find many inventive uses for in his novels.
Listing this heavyweight crowd as the Professor’s friends really amounts to Verne showing off a bit, establishing his scientific chops. Sir Humphrey Davy is the scientist most important to the geological ideas found in the novel. Verne has the Professor relate an anecdote to young Axel about a visit Davy paid him in 1825, when Davy was president of the Royal Society. Axel, ever the worrier—making him a convenient foil for the Professor’s ideas—is fretting that they’ll fry if they venture down into the earth, saying “it is generally recognized that the temperature rises about one degree for every seventy feet below the surface … if we were to go only twenty-five miles down … the temperature there is over 1,300 degrees.” The Professor replies, sensibly, that no one really knows what is going on down there. He then asks Axel, “Isn’t it a fact that the number of volcanoes has greatly diminished since the beginning of the world, and may we not conclude that if there is heat in the centre it is decreasing?”
This tidbit of directionalist thought is followed by the anecdote of Davy’s 1825 visit. If you do the math, the fifty-year-old Professor (his stated age in 1863 when the novel takes place) would have been
twelve
when this great meeting of the minds happened. It seems such a glaring glitch that Verne should have been aware of it; but it also reveals how vital this little meeting with Davy was to his scheme. “Among the questions,” the Professor says, “we spent a long time discussing the hypothesis of the liquid nature of the terrestrial nucleus. We agreed that this liquidity could not exist … Because this liquid mass would be subject, like the sea, to the attraction of the moon, and consequently, twice a day, there would be internal tides which, pushing up the earth’s crust, would cause periodical earthquakes.” So he and Davy are not Neptunists. Axel counters saying, “Yet it is obvious that the surface of the globe has been subjected to the action of fire, and it is reasonable to suppose that the outer crust cooled down first, while the heat took refuge in the centre.” To this the Professor offers,
twelve
when this great meeting of the minds happened. It seems such a glaring glitch that Verne should have been aware of it; but it also reveals how vital this little meeting with Davy was to his scheme. “Among the questions,” the Professor says, “we spent a long time discussing the hypothesis of the liquid nature of the terrestrial nucleus. We agreed that this liquidity could not exist … Because this liquid mass would be subject, like the sea, to the attraction of the moon, and consequently, twice a day, there would be internal tides which, pushing up the earth’s crust, would cause periodical earthquakes.” So he and Davy are not Neptunists. Axel counters saying, “Yet it is obvious that the surface of the globe has been subjected to the action of fire, and it is reasonable to suppose that the outer crust cooled down first, while the heat took refuge in the centre.” To this the Professor offers,
You are mistaken there. The earth was heated by the combustion of its surface and nothing else. Its surface was composed of a great number of metals, such as potassium and sodium, which have the peculiar property of igniting at the mere contact with air and water. These metals caught fire when the atmospheric vapours fell in the form of rain on the soil; and little by little, when the waters penetrated into the fissures of the earth’s crust, they started fresh fires together with explosions and eruptions. Hence the large number of volcanoes in the early period of the earth.
This is a clear statement of ideas on the earth’s heat presented by Davy in the series of lectures on geology he presented to the London Royal Institution for the first time in 1805 and many times thereafter. Davy the chemist couldn’t imagine internal heat without something to
burn,
and so he denied the widespread central heat proposed by Hutton and the uniformitarians. As Davy argued in one of the 1805 geology lectures, “if a permanent fire had been acting for ages upon the interior of the crust of the globe, its effects must long ago have been perceived upon the whole surface, which would have exhibited not a few widely scattered volcanoes but one ignited and glowing mass.”
33
This idea was crucial to Verne’s story, since if there actually were great heat down there, he couldn’t send his explorers on their subterranean adventure. Even in 1805 Davy’s chemical explanation for vulcanism was something of an outlier, and by Verne’s time almost no one believed in it. So here is an instance of Verne relying on outmoded science to serve his story’s needs.
burn,
and so he denied the widespread central heat proposed by Hutton and the uniformitarians. As Davy argued in one of the 1805 geology lectures, “if a permanent fire had been acting for ages upon the interior of the crust of the globe, its effects must long ago have been perceived upon the whole surface, which would have exhibited not a few widely scattered volcanoes but one ignited and glowing mass.”
33
This idea was crucial to Verne’s story, since if there actually were great heat down there, he couldn’t send his explorers on their subterranean adventure. Even in 1805 Davy’s chemical explanation for vulcanism was something of an outlier, and by Verne’s time almost no one believed in it. So here is an instance of Verne relying on outmoded science to serve his story’s needs.
The novel draws on a melange of geological ideas.
On their way from Reykjavik to their entry point on the quiescent volcano, Axel notices an unusual basalt wall rising in a series of thirty-foot columns. Basalt was a key point of argument between the Neptunists and Plutonists. The Neptunists believed basalts were precipitated out of water, while the Plutonists said (correctly) that they were of an igneous nature. Axel says, “As is well known, basalt is a brown rock of igneous origin,” putting him among the Plutonists on this one. But as they finally begin their descent into the interior and start encountering lower strata, the terminology is Neptunist:
At noon a change occurred in the walls of the gallery … The coating of lava had given place to solid rock, arranged in sloping and often vertical strata. We were passing through rocks of the transitional period, the Silurian Period. ‘It is all quite clear!’ I exclaimed. ‘In the second period the water deposits formed these schists, limestones, and shales. We are turning our backs on the granite mass!’
34
This language is consistent with the Neptunist model of rock formation. Primary rocks were crystalline, precipitated out of the primeval ocean. The next oldest transitional rocks were sedimentary but lacking in fossils. These were followed by secondary rocks, sedimentary and containing fossils, and then the newest tertiary rocks of an alluvial composition, the only ones formed according to present processes. This too is an antiquated scheme of classification, which equated rock type with age, not corresponding to the current categories of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks, so designated by the processes creating them and unrelated to how old they are. In this passage Axel believes schist, limestone, and shale result from water deposits, and while he’s batting two out of three, schist is a metamorphic rock not so formed.
The trio next find themselves in a passageway that seems to lead up, at least from the fossil evidence they encounter. “We have come to the rocks of the period when the first plants and animals appeared,” observes Axel. “In the Silurian epoch,” he continues, “the seas contained over fifteen hundred vegetable and animal species.” And there are “distinct impressions of rock weeds and club mosses” and then “a perfectly preserved shell which had belonged to an animal rather similar to the present-day woodlouse”—a trilobite. They spend the next day walking through this gallery, passing arch after arch. “The schist, limestone, and old red sandstone sparkled magnificently in the electric light.” Axel says,
Most of the marbles bore impressions of primitive organisms. Creation had obviously made considerable progress since the previous day. Instead of the rudimentary trilobites, I noticed remains of a more advanced order of creatures, including ganoid fishes and some of those saurians in which palaeontologists have detected the earliest reptile forms. The Devonian seas were inhabited by a vast number of creatures of this species, and deposited them in thousands on the newly formed rocks. It was becoming obvious that we were climbing the ladder of animal life on which man occupies the highest rung.
Here Verne is expressing a divine plan progressivism. Like most French children, he was brought up Catholic, but he was never particularly religious. Various biographers have pointed out that his publisher, Hetzel, an atheist, routinely urged Verne to insert more family values–style Christianity into his stories to make them more commercially viable among mainstream readers. Here, and throughout the novel, the take on paleontology is decidedly progressivist: man is at the top of the heap of creatures, and all was brought about by the Creator. Whatever his own views, Verne was doing his best to be a popular author, and the Lyell/Darwin
non
progressive view was, well, too progressive for most people at the time.
non
progressive view was, well, too progressive for most people at the time.
Moments later the rocks change dramatically, and they are surrounded by coal. Its formation was another of the great mysteries back then. Fossil evidence in coal revealed it chiefly to be the remains of tropical vegetation—but how could these plants, apparently needing a hot equatorial climate to thrive, have grown in all these currently frigid regions of the world? Before plate tectonics—the idea that the continents break up and move around like vast, slow puzzle pieces—accounting for this led to all sorts of convoluted theories. “The whole history of the coal period was written on these dark walls,” Axel says, “and a geologist could easily follow all its various phases.” The theory Verne/Axel proposes is so wonderfully cockeyed I can’t resist quoting it at length:
At that age of the world which preceded the Secondary Period, the earth was covered with vast stretches of vegetation, the product of the dual action of tropical heat and constant moisture. A misty atmosphere enveloped the earth, screening it from the rays of the sun.Hence the conclusion that the high temperature then prevailing was not due to the sun, which may not even have been ready yet to play the brilliant part it now acts. There were no “climates,” as yet, and a torrid heat, equal at the equator and at both poles, was spread over the whole surface of the globe. This heat came from the interior of the earth.Despite Professor Lidenbrock’s theories, a violent fire was blazing in the bowels of the sphere, and its action extended as far as the outer layers of the earth’s crust. The plants, deprived of the beneficent rays of the sun, produced neither flowers nor scent, but their roots drew vigorous life from the burning soil of this early period. There were few trees, only herbaceous plants—tall grasses, ferns, lycopods, sigillarias, and asterophyllites, belonging to families which are now rare but at that time contained thousands of species.Now it is to this exuberant vegetation that the coal measures owe their origin. The as yet elastic crust of the earth obeyed the movements of the liquid mass underneath. Countless fissures and depressions resulted, and the plants, sinking beneath the surface of the waters, gradually formed huge accumulations.Then natural chemistry came into action; in the depths of the seas, the vegetable masses were turned into peat to begin with, and then, under the influence of the gases and the heat of fermentation, were completely mineralized.Thus were formed those huge beds of coal which, despite their size, the industrial nations will exhaust within three centuries unless they limit their consumption.
This explanation for the origin of coal sounds today more whimsically poetic than scientific: formed during a hot, misty primeval time when the sun may not have been properly lit up yet, and plants drew their energizing animus from the fires down below. A lingering Burnet/Werner Neptunism/catastrophism creates cracks and fissures sucking all this plant matter below the surface—the thinking being that the liquid earth shrank as it cooled, causing all sorts of disruptions in the newly forming crust—where it stews until it becomes coal. And then the forward-thinking little note at the end, about its rapacious use by industrial nations.
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