Dr. B makes important Earth Science contacts!
A selection from Jules Verne
A selection from Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Chapter 4
“I accept all your explanations,” I said “and Saknussemm is right. He found out the entrance to the bowels of the earth, he has indicated correctly, but that he or anyone else ever followed up the discovery is madness to suppose.”
“Why so, young man?”
“All scientific teaching, theoretical and practical, shows it to be impossible.”
“I care nothing for theories,” retorted my uncle.
“But is it not well-known that heat increases one degree for every seventy feet you descend into the earth? Which gives a fine idea of the central heat. All the matters which compose the globe are in a state of incandescence; even gold, platinum, and the hardest rocks are in a state of fusion. What would become of us?”
“Don’t be alarmed at the heat, my boy.”
“How so?”
“Neither you nor anybody else know anything about the real state of the earth’s interior. All modern experiments tend to explode the older theories. Were any such heat to exist, the upper crust of the earth would be shattered to atoms, and the world would be at an end.” A long, learned and not uninteresting discussion followed, which ended in this wise: “I do not believe in the dangers and difficulties which you, Henry, seem to multiply; and the only way to learn, is like Arne Saknussemm, to go and see.”
“Well,” cried I, overcome at last, “let us go and see. Though how we can do that in the dark is another mystery.”
“Fear nothing. We shall overcome these, and many other difficulties. Besides, as we approach the center, I expect to find it luminous—”
“Nothing is impossible.”
“And now that we have come to a thorough understanding, not a word to any living soul. Our success depends on secrecy and dispatch.”
From http://jv.gilead.org.il/vt/c_earth/04.html
