NOTHING NEW
UNDER THE EARTH:
THE GEOLOGY
OF VERNE'S JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH
John Breyer
and William Butcher
ABSTRACT
Voyage au
centre de la Terre (1864, 1867: Journey to the Centre of the
Earth) by Jules Verne (1828-1905) has been a bestseller in both French and
English for well over a century. Literary scholars, however, have taken an
almost exclusively intrinsic approach to studying the novel, without referring
to its sources or writing. The source of the science has not been documented. Louis
Figuier (1819-1894), a contemporary and compatriot of Verne, was a prolific
writer on scientific and technological matters for the general public. His La
Terre avant le déluge
(1863: The World before the Deluge) sold an “unprecedented” 25,000
copies in four French editions in less than two years. Much of the scientific
information in Verne's novel was taken directly from this work. Verne
incorporates scientific details and concepts treated by Figuier in La Terre
in the Journey and describes and discusses them in near-identical
language. Exact numbers are duplicated and lengthy lists are reproduced in the
same order. The borrowing is widespread and blatant. Verne, nonetheless,
exhibits considerable skill in integrating the material borrowed from Figuier
into the Journey and interpreting it in specifically literary terms.
INTRODUCTION
Amongst the
works of Jules Verne, Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth)
is unique. It was the first unqualified critical success of Verne's career—and
the first work written under the supervision of his publisher and mentor Jules
Hetzel (1814-1886). The style of the novel is more exuberant and colorful than in most of the sixty-four novels in the Voyages
Extraordinaires that follow. As a result, Journey
to the Centre of the Earth has been a consistent bestseller in both French
and English for well over a century, and has recently entered the literary
canon, with many studies of it being published over the last two decades. However,
most literary scholars have taken an almost exclusively intrinsic approach to
the novel, as if the text had magically sprung into being without discernible origins.
The writer’s inspiration and sources have been largely ignored. Here we address
the latter issue by identifying the major source of Verne's scientific material
and documenting the extent of his borrowing.
In the
opening chapters of the novel, Professor Lidenbrock
and his nephew Axel discover a ancient runic document that claims to indicate a
route to the center of the Earth. They travel to
Iceland, employ a local guide, and, following the document's coded directions,
enter a volcanic crater. The three descend through the sedimentary layers of
the crust into its granite foundation. They become separated, but are re-united
on the shore of a underground sea in an immense cavern hollowed in the granite.
The travelers venture upon the sea in a crudely
constructed raft built of logs from trees living in a subterranean forest. At
sea they witness a battle between dinosaur-like "sea monsters" and
disembark on an island with a breathtaking geyser. Later, their raft is hurled
before a horrific storm and the party is shipwrecked. Venturing inland the
three explorers discover a vast repository of vertebrate remains, including the
perfectly preserved mummy of an "incontestably Caucasian" human
being. Professor Lidenbrock and Axel also see a herd
of living mastodons and their attendant shepherd—a twelve-foot giant with a
huge bough. The two flee for their lives. Later, after regaining their
composure, the explorers set off an explosion to remove a boulder obstructing
their downward journey. A gaping crevice opens, swallowing the waters of the
underground sea and the raft on which the travelers
are sheltering. After being carried deep toward the center
of the Earth the three are returned to the surface in Italy by an accommodating
volcanic eruption.
Scientific,
ideological and philosophical issues being debated in the mid-nineteenth
century are closely integrated into the novel. The central question—one
unanswered at the time—was the condition of the Earth's interior. Was it molten
or solid? Less central, but more controversial, was the nature of human
prehistory. The discipline was just emerging at the time and the term itself was
not yet in common usage[1] —Verne
uses “antédiluvien,” still partly biblical language.
Contemporary debates over evolution and the nature and meaning of evolutionary
progress also made their way into the novel. The depiction in Journey of
long-extinct animals, a preserved modern man and a human giant raised issues
that were being contested by contemporary scientists. The progress of the
discussions was being followed closed by the educated public, many of whom were
of course reading Verne's novels. The writer’s treatment of these contemporary
scientific issues is given added force by the fact that Lidenbrock
and Axel not only relate their experiences, but, as scientists, debate the
competing theories and even refer to contemporary authorities.
Our
starting point will be to examine Louis Figuier's La
Terre avant le déluge
(1863).[2] From
there, we will attempt to establish our central claim that a large part of the
scientific information in Verne's novel was taken directly from the 1863 work. This
includes both the specific scientific details incorporated in the novel and the
general worldviews espoused by the protagonists.
Verne
occasionally mentions Figuier in his letters to the publisher Jules Hetzel, for
instance on 4 November 1877; and his other works sometimes involve direct
borrowing, for example in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas.[3] However,
the authors of this article feel sceptical about the many loosely-written
pieces where the observation of general similarities of approach between any
two given authors has led to unwarranted assumptions, especially since it is
hard to exclude a common source or the influence of the "conventional
wisdom" of the time. Certainly, the basic thesis of Alcide
d’Orbigny (1802-1857), that rock strata are ordered
by their fossil content, thus dividing the past into visible stages, is the
metaphor that generates the whole of Journey to the Centre of the Earth.[4] And certainly, the
influence of a wide range of other scientific writers is visible in Verne’s
novel: especially Elie de Beaumont and Charles
Sainte-Claire Deville for volcanoes; Agassiz for the
classification of fossil fish; and Boitard’s Paris
avant les hommes (1863)
and William Carpenter’s Zoology … and Chief Forms of Fossil Remains
(1857, reissued 1866) for the prehistory.[5] In the present case,
nevertheless, we believe that the evidence is conclusive that Verne borrowed
directly and extensively from Figuier, for his geological and other
information.[6]
Louis
Figuier (1819-1894) was a brilliant and prolific writer on scientific and
technological matters for the general public. Amongst his works were the
4,000-page L'Année scientifique et
industrielle and Les Merveilles de la
science, ou Description populaire des inventions modernes, plus volumes on electricity, canals, railways, alchemy and life after death. Verne’s second prose
publication, “Un Voyage en ballon” (1851), was a
direct transcription (unacknowledged) of Figuier’s
article “Les Aérostats et les aéronautes”, published
in the Revue des deux mondes in 1850. But La Terre
avant le déluge was one
of the writer’s greatest successes: Figuier points out in the preface to the
third edition that it had sold an unprecedented 18,000 copies in the first few
months. One reason for the popularity was the brilliance and depth of the
writing. As H. W. Bristow notes in his translation and adaptation, the author
allows himself many speculations and—in Bristow's narrowly Anglo-Saxon and
empirical view—statements difficult to justify in purely scientific terms. However,
the work is a wide-ranging, stimulating and generally accurate account, in a
fine style, of what were at the time controversial views on the past history of
the globe.
As for Voyage
au centre de la Terre, we know little about its inception. Although a
manuscript has recently emerged,[7] there are
no surviving proofs, and the only reference in the correspondence occurs on 12
August 1864.[8] Since the
novel is not mentioned in the contract with Hetzel of 1 January 1864, it was
probably written between these two dates (the action of the novel itself runs
up to March 1864). The first edition appeared on 25 November 1864, but this
novel is unique amongst Verne's in that it underwent changes after this initial
publication. Most of chapters 37-39 were added in the first large-octavo edition
(1867). The 1864 edition features the fight between the ichthyosaur and the
plesiosaurus but the fossil remains of human beings and the living giant
herdsman, which go well beyond the limits of plausibility Verne normally
allowed himself, appear first in the 1867 edition.
GEOLOGICAL
INTERLUDES
The
Transition Strata
Only a few
days into the downward journey, Axel is convinced that the path the three men
are following leads back up toward the surface. He tries to convince Professor Lidenbrock that the group is traversing Silurian strata
from the Transition era, going up through the stratigraphic
series:
I hadn't gone a hundred yards further before incontrovertible
proof appeared in front of my eyes. It was to be expected, for during the
Silurian Period there were more than 1,500 species of vegetables and animals in
the seas ... On the walls could be clearly seen the outlines of seaweeds and Lycopodia ... I picked up a perfectly-preserved shell, one
that had belonged to an animal more or less like the present-day woodlouse. Then
I caught up with my uncle and said to him:
`See!'
`Well,' he replied calmly, `it is the shell of a crustacean of the
extinct order of trilobites. Nothing else.'[9]
Compare
this passage with Figuier:
Most trilobites … were able to roll themselves into a ball, like
our woodlouse, doubtless to escape the attack of an enemy … The seas were
already abundantly inhabited at the end of the Upper Silurian period, for
naturalists today know more than 1,500 species, animal and vegetable, belonging
to the Silurian period.[10]
Clearly
Verne is quite similar to Figuier. In the next sentence, Figuier writes:
'Amongst the marine plants, a few species of algae, classified as belong to the
Fucoid genus, have been found in the rocks';[11] then, four pages later,
again describing the Silurian: 'We have seen … life opening up, and
organization beginning with plants of a completely inferior order … algæ and kelps.'[12] In the same way, Verne
has Axel observing 'the outlines of seaweeds and Lycopodia'[13] in the Silurian strata. Figuier
characterizes the Silurian formations of Europe as 'the most dislocated and
disturbed'.[14]
He writes, 'The beds, originally horizontal, are turned up, contorted, folded
over, sometimes even vertical'.[15] On passing into the
Silurian strata, Axel correspondingly notes that the beds are 'at an angle,
often in fact vertical'.[16]
Professor Lidenbrock remains unswayed by
the discovery of the trilobite and presses on in the same direction. To Axel,
however, 'the signs of the Transition Era became more and more obvious.' He
mentions:
Devon, the county which gave its name to this sort of terrain … [the
rocks] displayed the outlines of primitive animals. Since the day before,
creation had made clear signs of progress. Instead of rudimentary trilobites, I
spotted evidence of a more perfect order: amongst others, Ganoid
fish.[17]
Figuier's description of the Devonian begins:
… Devonian, so called
because the rocks corresponding to that period appear very clearly and of great
extent in Devon … [the strata exhibit] some species of animals and vegetables
of much more complex organization than those that appeared on the globe in the
primitive period … as our globe ages the organization [of creatures] becomes
constantly more complicated.[18]
Ganoid fish, in particular the genus Pterichthys, are the first animals mentioned in Figuier's survey of the Devonian fauna. The first fish
caught by Hans during the sea voyage later in the journey will be of the genus Pterichthys.
The next
day, still going up through the stratigraphic series,
the three explorers leave the Devonian strata and ascend into the Coal Measures
of the Carboniferous Period. Axel is able to 'read' the history written in
successive stages on the dark walls:
[In] the Carboniferous period … the Earth became covered in
immense vegetation due to the tropical heat combined with a permanent humidity.
An atmosphere of steam enveloped all parts of the globe, shielding it from the
sun's rays.
Hence the conclusion that the high temperatures could not have
come from that new source of heat. Perhaps the sun was not ready to play its
brilliant role. But in any case `climates' did not yet exist, and a torrid heat
spread across the entire surface of the globe, the same at the poles as at the
equator. Where did it come from? The interior of the globe.[19]
Figuier
gives a similar accounting of conditions during the Carboniferous:
… the heat was the same in
all latitudes … From the equatorial regions to … the icy Arctic Ocean … from
Spitzbergen to the heart of Africa, the carboniferous flora is always the same
… When we find the same fossils in Greenland and on the equator … we are forced
to admit that at this period the temperature of the globe was the same
everywhere. As a result, what we now call ‘climate’ was unknown in geological
times: there was only one climate over the whole globe.
Where, then, did this uniformity of temperature originate that
surprises us today?
It came from the excessive heat of the globe. The Earth was still
so hot in itself that its innate temperature dominated, rendering superfluous
and imperceptible the heat that the central star sent it, in other words the
sun.[20]
Axel
concludes his 'geological considerations' of the Carboniferous with
speculations on how coal is formed and comments on consumption of coal
resources by the 'industrialized nations':
Despite Professor Lidenbrock's theories,
a violent fire smouldered in the bowels of the spheroid. Its effects were felt
even in the outermost layers of the Earth's crust ...
There were few trees, only herbaceous plants, huge grassy areas,
ferns, Lycopodia, sigillarias,
Asterophyllites …
It was this exuberant vegetation which produced the coal. The
Earth's crust, still elastic, followed the movements of the liquid mass it
encased. Hence a large amount of cracking and subsiding. The plants, dragged
under water, gradually built up considerable piles of matter.
Next came the action of nature's chemistry: on the bottom of the
seas, the vegetable masses became peat. Then, thanks to the effect of the
gases, and in the heat from the fermentation, they underwent a complete
mineralization.
In this way were formed the huge layers of coal.[21]
Similarly,
Figuier concludes his lengthy treatment of the Carboniferous with a discussion
of how coal is formed (p. 96-114) and comments on the vast extent and global
distribution of the world's coal resources (p. 112-114), in particular:
During the Carboniferous period, the terrestrial crust, at that
time hardly consolidated, merely formed a highly elastic envelope, resting on
the interior fluid mass. This elastic crust was agitated by alternating
movements … It was probably through one of these collapses of the ground that
the forests and vegetable masses … found themselves submerged and that
accumulated the grasses and shrubs … which constitute coal.[22]
Axel makes
one last scientific observation in the coal gallery. He detects 'a very
pronounced smell of hydrocarbon' indicating the presence 'of the dangerous gas
which miners call firedamp' in the gallery. Figuier opines that coal is formed
primarily from herbaceous plants, ferns, and aquatic vegetation, not trees. When
submerged, these plants undergo chemical change and in becoming peat give off carburated hydrogen with which the coal is impregnated.
The Forest
at Port Gräuben
After wandering
lost for two days, Axel is re-united with his companions on the shore of a vast
underground sea. Growing near the strand is a strange ‘tall, thick, dense
forest of trees of medium height'. Professor Lidenbrock
identifies it as a forest of mushrooms.
He was right … how big these plants grew in their preferred hot,
humid environments … I knew that the Lycoperdon
giganteum reached eight or nine feet in
circumference; but here [were] mushrooms 30 or 40 feet high … thousands of them
…
But the vegetation … was not confined to mushrooms … : they were
the common shrubs of the Earth, here of phenomenal size, Lycopodia
a hundred feet high, giant Sigillarias,
tree-ferns as tall as pines from northern climes, Lepidodendrons
with cylindrical forked stalks ending in long leaves bristling with coarse
hairs like monstrous fleshy plants.
'Astonishing, magnificent, splendid!' cried my uncle. `Here we
have the complete flora of … the Transition Era … these humble garden plants,
which became trees in the first centuries of the Earth.[23]
Here is Figuier's description of the Devonian flora:
… the trees of the high
forest are completely absent … Cryptogames, of which
our present-day mushrooms can give some idea, surely formed the majority of
this primitive vegetation … Lycopodia were the
dominant herbaceous plants, through both the size of the individuals and the
variety and number of their species.[24]
The
remaining part of Axel's description is paralleled by
Figuier's discussion of the flora of the
Carboniferous Limestone and Coal Measures, for example, 'immense Sigillarias' and 'Lepidodendrons
[with] bifurcating cylindrical stems'.[25] Verne’s description of 'long
leaves bristling with coarse hairs like monstrous fleshy plants' exactly
corresponds to the illustrations of L. sternbergi
and L. elegans in Figuier.
The floor
of the Transition forest is littered with the bones of much younger mammals. The
three anachronistic mammals discovered by Axel are the mastodon, the dinotherium and the megatherium. The
first two of these animals are discussed at length and illustrated in Figuier's description of the Miocene fauna of the Tertiary
period. The megatherium of the Quaternary Period also
receives several pages of coverage from Figuier, together with two
illustrations.
Axel's Waking Dream
On the
second day aboard the raft on the Lidenbrock Sea,
Axel has a ‘waking dream' in which the history of the Earth is re-played
backward before his eyes at ever increasing speed until ‘centuries are flowing
past like days.' He is carried back to the beginning of the universe. The
climax of Axel's vision is as follows:
… the vapour is covering up
the entire Earth, which stage by stage becomes nothing but a gaseous mass,
heated to red and white hot, as big as the sun and shining as bright!
In the centre of this nebula, 1.4 million times as big as the
globe it will one day form, I am being carried off into planetary space![26]
Compare
this with Figuier’s broad outline of history:
Our planet, then, should be
imagined as … entirely gaseous matter. And if we consider that substances
changed into gas occupy eighteen hundred times as much space as when solid, it
can be deduced that this gaseous mass had to be as large as the sun, which is
1.4 million times as big as the present-day globe.[27]
At this
stage, then, we can already see that Verne's borrowing from Figuier is
consistent, right down to the figures and phraseology: but while borrowing the
scientific terminology and many of the ideas, he generally contextualizes them
by closely integrating them with, especially, Axel's
concerns. The dramatic descriptions benefit greatly from Verne's mastery of the
art of the novel. Nevertheless, the similarity between the texts is
incontrovertible.
The Sea
Battle
On the
sixth day aboard the raft, the travelers witness a
battle between two reptiles of the Secondary Period—an ichthyosaur and a
plesiosaur. Like the blind men viewing the elephant, Axel sees only a small
part of the ichthyosaur at any one time and declares it to be a porpoise,
lizard, crocodile and whale in turn (ch. 33). Figuier
describes his ichthyosaur as having ‘the head of a lizard, the teeth of a
crocodile, the vertebrae of a fish … and the fins of a whale’.[28]
Verne
penned ‘the bloody eye of the ichthyosaurus, as big as a man's head' and
‘Nature has given it an extremely powerful optical apparatus, able to resist
the pressure of the water in the depths where it lives.'[29] Figuier wrote that the
size of the ichthyosaur's eyes ‘frequently exceeds that of the human head' and
that they have ‘the strength necessary to support the considerable pressure of
the upper reaches [sic] of the sea'.[30]
The other
combatant in the sea battle, at first taken to be ‘a forty-foot turtle and a
thirty-foot serpent' is soon recognized to be a ‘plesiosaurus, a serpent with a
cylindrical trunk and a short tail, [that] has legs shaped into paddles'.[31] Figuier describes the
plesiosaurus as a combination of a turtle and a serpent, with a cylindrical
trunk and large paddles (p. 166-168 (cf. p. 199-201)).
The
ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur simultaneously repelled and fascinated
nineteenth-century readers, who found the former particularly abhorrent because
it was thought at the time to eat its own young.[32] A battle
between an ichthyosaur and a plesioasaur figures
prominently in a drawing what year? by Henry Thomas De la Beche (1796-1855) of life in the Liassic
seas of ancient Dorset. A lithograph of this drawing made in the same year by Scharf Christian name? dates? was 'the first true
scene from deep time to [receive] even limited publication'.[33] Other
illustrations of these two monsters of the Lias
followed frequently in the succeeding years until the scene became, in Rudwick's words, a 'visual cliché'.
The third
edition of Figuier's La Terre avant
le déluge, published in 1864, contained ‘twenty-five
ideal views of landscapes of the ancient world'[34] drawn by Edouard Riou (1833-1900). One of
these shows an ichthyosaurus emerging from the depths to confront a plesiosaur
on the surface with its neck arched preparing to strike (Fig. 130 in Figuier,
1864). The ichthyosaur is venting water from two blowholes in front of
its eyes. Riou also provided 56 illustrations for Journey
to the Centre of the Earth in 1864. One in chapter 33 shows a similar scene
but with the two 'monsters' locked in mortal combat and the ichthyosaur not
venting from its blowholes. In the text Verne seems to be referring to the
drawing made for Figuier when Axel and Professor Lidenbrock
observe the (emphasis added) ‘two liquid columns' produced by the
ichthyosaur.[35]
Landfall and Beyond—The Plain of Bones
Exploring
inland, after being shipwrecked, the travelers—in the
section of the novel added in 1867—come across a vast repository of fossil
bones covering ‘perhaps three square miles' and containing ‘the whole history
of animal life' (ch. 37). In this mortuary Professor Lidenbrock finds first a skull and then a mummified human
body, which he pronounces to be that of a man from the Quaternary Period. He
follows his discovery with an amazing display of erudition, enumerating
instances in which, by honest mistake or deliberate fraud, fossils have been
presented to the gullible public as the remains of human or assimilated beings.
He begins with cases in which the bones of Ice Age elephants have been
attributed to the heroes of myth or antiquity and concludes with Johann Scheuchzer's egregious identification of the skeleton of a
giant salamander as a man who had witnessed the Flood:
I am not unacquainted with
the story of Ajax's kneecap, with what was claimed to be Oreste's
body as found by the Spartans, or with Asterius's
ten-cubit-long body as described by Pausanias. I have
read the reports on the Trápani skeleton discovered
in the 14th century, which people wished to believe was Polyphemus's,
as well as the accounts of the giant dug up in the 16th century near Palermo. You
are as aware as I, gentlemen, of the analysis carried out at Lucerne in 1577 of
the enormous bones claimed by the illustrious doctor Félix
Plater to belong to a giant 19 feet tall. I have
devoured Cassanion's treatises, and all the
monographs, pamphlets, presentations and counter-presentations ever published
on the skeleton of Teutobochus, King of the Cimbrians, who invaded Gaul and who was excavated from a
sandpit in the Dauphiné in 1613. In the 18th century,
I would have combated Peter Camper's affirmations regarding the existence of Scheuchzer's pre-Adamites![36]
In this
passage Verne has brilliantly condensed two much lengthier passages in Figuier,
including virtually all the proper names, such as ‘Pre-Adamites
… Peter Camper … Scheuchzer … Asterius
… Ajax … Trápani … Félix Plater … Lucerne … Teutobochus … Cassanion’. Lidenbrock's
recitation even follows the same order as the treatment of this topic given in La
Terre avant le déluge
(p. 326- 328 and 340-342), although Figuier makes more explicit Peter Camper's
role in the controversy over Scheuchzer's pre-Adamite witnesses of the Flood. At the same time, Verne
entertains the reader by a variety of literary devices, such as employing Axel's point of view to mock Lidenbrock's
over-academic style. In sum, this passage would on its own provide conclusive
proof that Verne borrowed from Figuier in writing the novel.
The Forest
Giant
Further
inland, the adventurers discover a forest, which displays ‘the vegetation of
the Tertiary period in all its splendor'. Axel sees
‘enormous shapes wandering around under the trees … gigantic animals, a whole
herd of mastodons … fully alive and resembling [those] discovered in the bogs
of Ohio in 1801.' Professor Lidenbrock stays Axel's instinctive retreat and urges him forward. They see
a man 'shepherding' the mastodons, or rather a giant: ‘ … more than twelve feet
tall [with a] head as big as a buffalo's … half hidden in … his wild locks
[like those] of the elephants of the first ages.' This giant ‘from before the
flood' carries an enormous bough as a shepherd's crook.
Figuier
provides an extended discussion of the American mastodon—five pages of text and
six illustrations. He reports that the first skeleton of the animal previously
known only by its skull and teeth, called by Buffon
'the elephant of the Ohio', was discovered on the banks of the Hudson in New
York in 1801. Another skeleton was recovered from a marsh west of the river
later that same year. Verne seems to have conflated the two items in writing
‘the bogs of the Ohio in 1801' (ch. 39). After
recounting the several discoveries, Figuier tells of an Indian legend that
these great animals lived in former times, conjointly with a race of men whose
size was proportionate to their own!
Following
his eventual return to the surface, Axel doubts the testimony of his senses,
refusing to believe that humans—generations of them—lived beneath the surface. He
prefers instead to believe that the creature was ‘some Protopithecus,
some Mesopithecus like the one discovered by M. Lartet in the bone-laden bed of Sansan!'.[37] Figuier has a similar
paragraph describing the discovery of the man-sized Miocene ape Dryopithecus in the ‘bone-laden bed of Sansan'[38] by M. Lartet
and the Mesopithecus in Greece by Gaudry.
Verne seems to have combined the two ideas.
The Forest
Flora
The immense
forest adjoining the plain of bones is quite different from the grove of
mushrooms at Port Gräuben. Axel describes the
Tertiary flora in all its splendor:
Great palm-trees of species
no longer existing and superb palmaceae, pine, yews,
cypress and thujas … The ground was carpeted with … moss
and hepaticas … all intermixed and intertwined [with] trees from highly
different countries on the surface of the globe, the oak growing beside the palm-tree,
the Australian eucalyptus leaning on the Norwegian fir, the northern birch
mingling its branches with the New Zealand kauri.[39]
However, in
this forest, the ‘flowers, so numerous in the Tertiary Age when they first
appeared', are without color or perfume, partrly because of the absence of sunlight but also because
Verne's underground cavern, while of course being discovered in 1864,
simultaneously partakes of the distant past.
Figuier
provided a similar description of the forests of the Eocene in which ‘rose
lofty palm trees, of species since disappeared, such as … palmacites
… with many green trees … firs, pines, yews, and above all cypresses and thuyas.'[40] On the next page, he
remarks that ‘hepaticas and mosses grow in humid places'.[41] The flora also ‘included
a great number of those plants today confined to Australia', with the
eucalyptus mentioned as an example and shown in an illustration. In the summary
of the Tertiary preceding the section on the Eocene period, Figuier refers to
the Tertiary as ‘the period of flowers' and describes the surface as
‘embellished by their variegated colors'.[42] Figuier characterizes the
Miocene flora of Europe as containing both forms analogous to those of our
equatorial regions and genera suitable to temperate and even cold countries.
At this
stage, then, we have seen that there is a remarkable congruence between both
the terminology and the objects described by Figuier and Verne.
SHARED WORLD
VIEW
Geology in
the mid-19th Century
Two
opposing schools of geologic thought attracted adherents in the middle decades
of the nineteenth century.[43], [44], [45] ,[46] Directionalism and progressionism
were the central tenets of a mature catastrophism
articulated most authoritatively, in English at least, by Adam Sedgwick. Directionalism maintained that the intensity of certain
geologic processes such as volcanism, earthquake activity and mountain building
had declined over time as the interior of the Earth cooled. Progressionism
saw in the fossil record an increase in the level of organization or complexity
of life over time, culminating in the appearance of mankind in the recent
geologic past. Charles Lyell's strict uniformitarianism saw the Earth as a system in a state of
dynamic equilibrium. Lyell and his disciples, Darwin
among them, denied directionalism in Earth history
and progressionism in the fossil record.
Mature catastrophism was not overtly scriptural like the catastrophism of the 1820s advocated by William Buckland
(1784-1856) (who is cited in Verne's 'Humbug: The American Way of Life', a
spoof of Barnum-style geological hoaxes published in 1910, but probably written
in the 1860's). But this movement was not anti-scriptural, and indeed was often
seen as supporting revealed religion.[47] Directionalism and progressionism
had strong teleological overtones. Both were widely perceived as the Creator's
way of preparing a dwelling place for mankind through the operation of
secondary causes (natural law) rather than by divine fiat. Figuier advocated a directionalist view of earth history and progressionsim in the organic realm. He thus fits squarely
in the catastrophist camp. Moreover, like other members of this school, Figuier
openly proclaimed his strong religious beliefs in his text, interpreting earth
history and the progress of life as the visible working of the will of the
Creator.
Two
quotations from the Preface reveal the important scientific and religious
elements of Figuier's worldview. First, belief in
local or limited--as opposed to worldwide or global--catastrophes:
our globe has undoubtedly been the theatre of frequent
catastrophes: immense rents have torn its solid crust, eruptions … have issued
from its chasms … [and] torn up and displaced the soil, drowning continents,
excavating deep valleys and raising lofty mountains. But all these phenomena,
in spite of their power and redoubtable intensity, could not extend to the
entire globe … Their action was necessarily local.[48]
Second,
belief in progressionism, directionalism
and the compatibility of geology and religion:
Species have died out quite
naturally, of old age … The sovereign Master who created the animal and plant
species willed [it] … According to a plan emanating from his All-powerful
wisdom … races have made way for other … more perfect ones. Geology and
revelation are now agreed … Recent discoveries … have justified in this way the
tale of the sacred historian.
… Nothing shows with more
certainty than the study of geology … the creative power of God … After sad
chaos follows a still incandescent sphere, which is molded
into regular forms, and cools down enough to allow access to organic life … Its
burning surface … is covered … and decorated with shrubs and forests. The
continents and seas take on their definite boundaries. The first beings … were
succeeded by more and more perfect creatures, until God causes to emerge from
his creative hand his last work, man, adorned with the supreme quality of
intelligence, by which he rules the whole of nature and submits it to his laws.[49]
However, in
all of this, God acted through natural causes, not supernatural intervention. 'It
was not necessary … that the elements be overthrown' or that God call upon 'the
united fires of earth and the heavens.' All was accomplished 'according to a
plan emanating from the All-powerful and from His wisdom.' Read law for plan in
this passage to understand Figuier's scientific
position. For Figuier regularity (law) results from the will of the God. For
example, rotating fluid bodies take a spherical form because 'it is one of the
laws of their being, emanating from the Creator'.
The
worldview of the protagonists in Journey to the Centre of the Earth
generally mirrors that of Figuier, albeit watered down or subject to irony.
Progressionism, Teleology and
Evolution
To Axel,
the fossils contained in sedimentary record reveal the path of progress upward
from primitive animals to man. In the Devonian strata he notes:
outlines of primitive animals. Since the day before, creation had
made clear signs of progress. Instead of rudimentary trilobites, I spotted
evidence of a more perfect order: amongst others, Ganoid
fish ... It became plain that we were moving back up the scale of animal life,
of which man forms the peak.[50]
Progressionists often held that for each level of
organization the organisms created first were most advanced and that
degeneration generally followed. One English-language embodiment of this belief
was to be found in Hugh Miller's The Footprints of The Creator; or, The Asterolepis of Stromness,
published in 1847.[51] Its
religious warrant was to be found in the doctrine of decline from original
perfection associated with the Fall in Genesis. Axel thinks it likely that the Lidenbrock sea ‘contains only fossil species--in which both
fish and reptiles alike are more perfect the further back they were created';
and that ‘present-day saurians, even the largest and
most formidable crocodiles and alligators, are but feeble reductions of their
fathers of the first ages'.[52]
Mammals
also show this degeneration. After crossing the sea, Axel finds remains of
‘gigantic glyptodonts of the Pliocene period, of which the modern tortoise is
but a minute reduction'.[53] The mummified man of the
Quaternary found by Professor Lidenbrock is not a
hulking, prognathous Neanderthal but ‘incontestably
Caucasian'[54]
with a facial angle of nearly 90°. At the time Verne was writing, French
anthropologist Paul Broca (1824-1880) was arguing
that the higher races of mankind were orthognathous
and more or less white-skinned, whereas the primitive or degenerate races were prognathous and dark-skinned.[55]
In both his
dream aboard the raft (ch. 32) and subsequent
observation of the battle of the sea monsters (ch.
33), Axel gives the standard version of the succession of animal life of the progressionists, from ‘zoophytes of the Transition' to
mammals and man. He leaves little doubt as to the end to which this progress is
directed:
[The] whole fossil world
relives in my imagination. I am going back to the biblical ages of the
Creation, long before man was born, when the incomplete Earth was not yet ready
for him.[56]
Teleology
is writ large and small in the novel: the Earth was made as a home for man and
the mummified body found by the Professor was ‘preserved for exclusively
anthropological purposes!' (ch. 38)
Verne was
far from an advocate of evolution[57] and Axel's progressionism should not
be taken as an endorsement of that doctrine. Lyell
noted the 'almost paradoxical' state of affairs in which most progressionists were 'very vehement opponents of
transmutation', that is, evolution, and most transmutationists
were circumspect over progress in the fossil record.[58], [59]
Directionalism
Early in
the narrative Professor Lidenbrock offers a directionalist argument to convince Axel of the feasibility
of the journey, ‘Is it not true that the number of volcanoes has considerably
decreased since the first days of the world? And indeed if there is heat in the
centre, can one not deduce that it is also tending to diminish?'[60] During the journey Axel
ascribes many phenomena to geological forces acting with greater intensity in
the first ages of the Earth when the globe possessed greater heat. The fissure
in which the journey begins formed when ‘the Earth slowly cooled during the
first days of the world, the decrease in volume produced disruptions,
breakages, shrinkages, and crack in the crust'.[61] The precious metals seen
in the walls were deeply buried by ‘the upheavals of the first days'. Another
shaft the trio follows ‘had clearly been produced during the contraction of the
Earth's very structure, at the period when it was cooling down' (ch. 24). The immense clumps of
seaweed encountered on the voyage cause Axel to ask himself, ‘What must the
Earth have looked like during the first centuries of its formation when, acted
upon by heat and humidity, the vegetable kingdom was developing solitarily on
its surface?'[62]
To explain the remains of human beings in the underworld, Professor Lidenbrock hazards that even ‘in the Quaternary Period,
considerable upheavals in the Earth's crust still occurred. The lengthy cooling
of the globe produced fissures, cracks, and faults'.[63] The fossils, it is
implied, fell into these gaps: they were not contemporaneous with the
Quaternary.
Directionalism was much in vogue in the middle
decades of the nineteenth century. Earlier in the century, catastrophists had
decoupled the past from the present, allowing for differences in kind, not just
in intensity, between processes that operated in the remote geologic past and
those operating in the modern era.[64] However,
Figuier and the catastrophist geologists of mid-century embraced a directionalism which distanced the geologic past from the
present by merely quantitative, not qualitative, means. In the Epilogue, to the
question, ‘What are the causes of the present irregularities of the globe?',
Figuier answers: ‘The primordial cause is, as we have said so often, the
cooling of the Earth ... [which has produced] the folds, furrows, and fractures
leading to … the formation of the main mountains … which have caused new
continents to be created while filling in the beds of former seas.'[65] He concludes that these
causes, although in a much weakened form, seem to continue in operation to the
present day.
Design,
Providence and Law
The worldview
of Sedgwick, and others like him, included a God who was visible in nature and
active in human affairs.[66] The eight
Bridgewater Treatises published between 1833 and 1836 argued for a God manifest
in creation by enumerating specific examples of good design revealed by
contemporary science. By mid-century, however, many were willing to attribute
the 'designedness' of things to the operation of
natural laws rather than separate acts of contrivance. In the widely read Vestiges
of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844, Robert
Chambers stated this position clearly: 'the whole creation … depended upon one
law or decree of the Almighty … the idea of a separate exertion for each
[example of design] must appear totally inadmissible.'[67]
Buckland's
Bridgewater Treatises were in the older tradition of enumeration. First
published in 1836, Geology and Mineralogy underwent nine subsequent
editions by 1860.[68] The work
was translated into French by francophone Louis Agassiz,
often cited by Verne, and widely read by Continental scientists.[69] Figuier
may have been familiar with it. Illustrations from Buckland's work seem to be
included in the 358 figures in La Terre avant le déluge,[70] although,
as stated in the Preface (p. xii), Figuier borrowed these from d'Orbigny's Cours Élémentaire de Paléontologie et
de Géologie Stratigraphique,
not directly from Buckland's original work.
Axel makes
implicit allusions to a Divine Architect when viewing the columnar basalts in
the fjord of Stapi (ch. 14)
and perhaps when he describes the roof of the lava gallery as a ‘succession of
arches' in the Gothic and Roman style (ch. 19). Professor
Lidenbrock is more explicit. Describing the huge
cavity that contains the Lidenbrock Sea he remarks,
‘the vault is solid; the Great Architect … built it of good firm stuff’ (ch. 31).
Axel allows
for personal providence in human affairs. God led him to the whispering gallery
(ch. 28) and his fall into the grotto by the
underground sea is 'providential' (ch. 29). However,
it does not follow from this that Verne was necessarily religious: Hetzel often
strongly recommended that his author insert Christian comments, apparently for
commercial reasons, since he himself was an atheist! Natural phenomena are
explained in Verne's work by physical law—not by divine intervention. Axel and Lidenbrock are committed to law, as were Sedgwick and other
catastrophist geologists.[71], [72] ‘The
astounding acoustic effect' by which he is able to communicate with his
companions in the whispering gallery ‘could easily be explained by simple
natural laws' (ch. 28) and the anomalous clouds over
the subterranean sea are explained ‘by some physical law which was beyond me' (ch. 30). Professor Lidenbrock
believes that the atmosphere will become denser, 'following a law which has not
been completely determined,' as the party descends toward the center of the Earth. Concerning the baffling occurrence of
'sedimentary soil' at Port Gräuben and the fossil
vertebrates it contains, he claims that:
‘it can be explained
geologically. At a certain period, the Earth consisted only of an elastic
crust, subjected to alternate upward and downward movements, by virtue of the
laws of gravity. These probably gave rise to landslides, and a section of the
sedimentary terrains was carried down to the bottom of newly-opened chasms.'[73]
CONCLUSION
Verne was
accused of plagiarism a number of times in his career, most notably for Journey
but also for Around the World and other novels. He indignantly denied
these accusations although paying compensation in one case. He was defended on
one occasion by Henri Poincaré, future President of
France. The irony, of course, is that in those two novels, the borrowing from
other texts was systematic and obvious. Verne often named his sources within
his text, although he rarely indicated the extent of the borrowing and diluting
the acknowledgements by hiding them amongst scores of other names, as in Twenty
Thousand Leagues. In the recently published correspondence with Hetzel,[74] he claims
that he never 'copies', although admitting that Lavallée,
from whose draft he is writing Géographie
de la France, has purloined most of his material from Maltebrun.
Verne says his solution here is simply to rewrite the chapters to hide the
borrowing. While both copyright laws and general attitudes to reuse of material
were much more indulgent in the nineteenth century, it is surprising that
Figuier himself does not seem to have put on record the degree of Verne's debt.
For the conclusion stands out that, without La Terre avant
le déluge, the Journey could hardly have
been written. The parallelism is remarkable both in the scientific details
presented and the general geologic and scientific attitudes espoused. The pièce
de conviction is the multitude of figures, proper names and scientific
terms shared in the two works.
Verne,
however, also demonstrates considerable literary skill. Having extracted
significant information from Figuier, he always takes care to transform it
before integrating it into his story. Many devices are used—dialogue, the
disciple-master relationship, the combination of telling and showing, the use
of the perspective of the characters, even the ridiculing of learned scientific
discourse. Stylistically, while Verne occasionally shows his penchant for the
unadulterated list, he is normally careful to simplify without falsifying, to entertain
at the same time as inform.
What is not
clear is the precise sequence of events. Verne drew his inspiration and
material from Figuier for his 1864 edition; but the density of borrowing is
greater in the parts added in the 1867 version. Why, then, did he wait three
years before adding the three chapters? One answer may reside in the surge of
interest in prehistory in France during the intervening period. The publisher
Hetzel would surely have had his word to say in a major revision designed to
cash in on fashionable debate. But in the absence of any documentation about
the additions, answers will remain largely speculative.
In
conclusion, many of the ideas in Journey which for generations have been
assumed to be of Verne's own invention are not originally his, even if he
invariably adds a creative gloss to them. So close are Journey and La
Terre that we would claim that an analysis of one of the most famous novels
of the nineteenth century without reference to the source of its scientific
content may not be fruitful. The mature catastrophism
developed by geologists in the 1840-1850s and popularized by Figuier thus lives
on through Verne.
FOOTNOTES
References
Burroughs, E. R., 1922, At the Earth's Core: A. G. McClurg & Company, Chicago, 277 p.
Butcher, W., 1998a, translation, introduction and notes in
Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1st
edition, 1992; 3rd revised edition), Oxford University Press, Oxford
and New York, 234 p.
Butcher, W., 1998b, “Long-Lost Manuscript”, The Modern
Language Review, Vol. 93, Part 4, October 1998, pp. 961-71
Chambers, R., 1994, Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings, edited with a new introduction by
James A. Secord: University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 254 p.
Figuier, L., 1864, La Terre avant
Le Déluge: Ouvrage contenant 25 vues idéales de paysages de l'ancien monde
dessinées par Riou (Troisième Édition): Hachette
et Cie., Paris, 484 p.
Gillespie, C. C., 1959, Genesis and Geology: The Impact
of Scientific Discoveries upon Religious Beliefs in the Decades before Darwin:
Harper & Row, New York, 306 p.
Gould, S. J., 1981, The Mismeasure
of Man: W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 352 p.
Hallam, A., 1983, Great Geological Controversies: Oxford
University Press, New York, 182 p.
Lyell, C., 1863, The
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the
Origin of Species by Variation: George W. Childs, Philadelphia, 518 p.
Ormerod, W. S. (editor), 1865,
Figuier, L. The World before the Deluge, containing Twenty-five Ideal
Landscapes of the Ancient World designed by Riou,
translated from the fourth French edition: Chapman and Hall, London, 448 p.
Rudwick, M. J. S., 1976, The
Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology
(Second Edition): University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 287 p.
Rudwick, M. J. S., 1992, Scenes
from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World:
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 280 p.
Ruse, M., 1979, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red
in Tooth and Claw: University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 320 p.
Secord, J. A., 1994, see
above Chambers, R. 1994.
Verne, J., 1864a, Voyage au center de la Terre: Hetzel, Paris, revised 1867.
[1] See A. Bowdoin
Van Ripper, Men among the Mammoths:
Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993).
2 The borrowing from Figuier
was unrecorded in the critical literature until the Presses Pocket edition of Voyage
au centre de la Terre in 1991, where the 'Dossier' (p. 436-459) quoted five
extracts from La Terre avant le déluge (p. 143-154, 300-303, 262-265, 284-285, and
72-73). Little attempt was made, however, to demonstrate the exact parallels,
or to contextualise them. Similarly, William Butcher in the third and revised
critical edition and translation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 226 and 229, shows
that the battle between the two sea-monsters, the information about giants and
the prehistoric vegetation are drawn from Figuier. But, apart from these
pointers, no work has been carried out to date on this question of Figuier as
the direct source of Verne's masterpiece.
[3] From Figuier’s Les Merveilles de la science (1869) and Articulés, poissons, reptiles et zoophytes,
mollusques [s.d.].
[4] Alcide-Charles-Victor-Dessalines d’Orbigny (1802-57) was a creationist geologist, renowned
for his eight-volume Paléontologie française (1840-54). He is cited in Twenty Thousand
Leagues as having classified nine species of squid in the Pacific Ocean and
in The Children of Captain Grant as having investigated the idea that
giants lived in Patagonia. The generative metaphor is analysed in ch. 4 of William Butcher, Verne’s Journey to the Centre
of the Self (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990).
[5] However,
Verne’s English was non-existent, so his reading of Carpenter must have been in
translation or summary form.
[6] Nor are we claiming that Verne did not
borrow from other texts of geological vulgarization, but simply that Figuier is
the most blatant example.
[7] Details are provided in
Butcher, Journey, p. xxxi-xxxii and 231-2 and William Butcher "Long
Lost Manuscript," The Modern Language Review, 1998, 93:961-971.
[8] Olivier
Dumas, Piero Gondolo della
Riva and Volker Dehs, editors, Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1863-1886), Volume 1 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1999), p. 30.
[9] ‘Je n’avais pas fait
cent pas que des preuves incontestables
s’offrirent à mes yeux. Cela devait être, car, à l’époque silurienne, les mers
renfermaient plus de quinze cents espèces végétales ou animales. … Sur les
parois se voyaient distinctement des empreintes de fucus et de lycopodes. … Je
ramassai une coquille parfaitement conservée, qui avait appartenu à un animal à
peu près semblable au cloporte actuel; puis, je rejoignis mon oncle et je lui
dis:
“Voyez ! ”
“Eh bien, répondit-il
tranquillement, c’est la coquille d’un crustacé de l’ordre disparu des
trilobites. Pas autre chose.”’ (ch. 19)
All English translations
of Voyage au centre de la Terre are taken from Butcher, Journey to
the Centre of the Earth (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), here p. 98-99.
[10] ‘la
plupart des trilobites … pouvaient se rouler en boule comme
nos Cloportes sans doute pour se soustraire à l’attaque d’un ennemi … Les mers
étaient déjà abondamment peuplées à la fin de la période silurienne supérieure,
car les naturalistes connaissent aujourd’hui plus de 1500 espèces végétales et
animales appartenant à l’ensemble de la période silurienne.’
The translations of Figuier
have been done by the authors of this article. For the contemporary
translation, vivid but unfaithful to modern eyes, see Ormerod,
The World Before the Deluge (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865).
[11] 'Parmi les
plantes marines, on a trouvé dans le terrain qui correspond à cette sous-période, quelques espèces d'algues que l'on rapporte
au genre Fucoïdes.'
[12] 'Nous
avons vu … la vie s'éclore, et l'organisation débuter par des plantes d'un
ordre tout à fait inférieur … des Algues et des Varechs'.
[13] 'des empreintes de fucus et de lycopodes' (ch. 19).
[14] 'les plus disloquées et bouleversées'.
[15] 'Ses
couches, originairement horizontales, sont relevées, contournées, plissées,
quelquefois même verticales' (p. 65).
[16] 'inclinées et souvent disposées verticalement' (ch. 19).
[17] ‘[le] Devonshire, qui donna son nom à ce genre de terrains.
… [Les] marbres offraient des empreintes d'animaux primitives. Depuis la
veille, la création avait fait un progrès évident. Au lieu de trilobites
rudimentaires, j'apercevais des débris d'un ordre plus parfait; entre autres,
des poissons Ganoïdes’ (ch. 20).
[18] … dévonienne,
parce que le terrain qui correspond à cette période apparaît très nettement et
avec beaucoup d'étendue dans le Devonshire … [les couches exhibent] quelques
espèces végétales et animales d'une organisation plus complexes que celles qui
avaient apparu sur le globe primitif … à mesure que le notre globe vieillit,
l'organisation se complique[r] sans cesse. (p. 67).
[19] ‘[Dans] la période houillère … la terre se recouvrit d'immenses
végétations dues à la double action d'une chaleur tropicale et d'une humidité
permanente. Une atmosphère de vapeurs enveloppait le globe de toutes parts, lui
dérobant encore les rayons du soleil.
De là cette
conclusion que les hautes températures ne provenaient pas de ce foyer nouveau.
Peut-être même l'astre du jour n'était-il pas prêt à jouer son rôle éclatant.
Les « climats » n'existaient pas encore, et une chaleur torride se
répandait à la surface entière du globe, égale à l'équateur et aux pôles. D'où
venait-elle? de l'intérieur du globe.’ (ch. 20)
[20] ‘la chaleur était la même à toutes les latitudes. Depuis les
régions équatoriales jusqu'à … l'océan glacial arctique ... depuis le Spitzberg
jusqu'au centre de l'Afrique, la flore houillée
présente une complète identité. Quand on trouve les mêmes fossiles au Groenland
et à l'équateur on est bien forcé de reconnaître qu'à cette époque la
température du globe était la même partout. Ainsi, ce que nous nommons
aujourd'hui le climat était inconnu pendant les temps géologiques: il n'y avait
qu'un seul climat pour le globe entier.
D'où provenait
cette uniformité de température qui a lieu de nous étonner aujourd'hui ?
Elle tenait à
l'excessive chaleur du globe. La terre était encore si chaude par elle-même,
que sa température propre primait, rendait superflue et inappréciable la
chaleur que lui envoyait l'astre central, c'est-à-dire le soleil.’ (p. 79-80)
[21] ‘En dépit des théories du professeur Lidenbrock,
un feu violent couvait dans les entrailles du sphéroïde; son action se faisait
sentir jusqu'aux dernières couches de l'écorce terrestre …
Il y avait peu
d'arbres, des plantes herbacées seulement, d'immenses gazons, des fougères, des
lycopodes, des sigillaires, des asterophyllites …
Or, c'est
précisément à cette exubérante végétation que la houille doit son origine.
L'écorce encore élastique du globe obéissait aux mouvements de la masse liquide
qu'elle recouvrait. De là des fissures, des affaissements nombreux. Les
plantes, entraînées sous les eaux, formèrent peu à peu des amas considérables.
Alors intervint
l'action de la chimie naturelle; au fond des mers, les masses végétales se
firent tourbe d'abord; puis, grâce à l'influence des gaz, et sous le feu de la
fermentation, elles subirent une minéralisation complète.
Ainsi se formèrent
ces immenses couches de charbon’ (ch. 20)
[22] ‘pendant la période houillère, la croûte terrestre, alors à
peine consolidée, ne formait qu'une enveloppe très-élastique,
en raison de son immense étendue, et qui reposait sur la masse liquide
intérieure. Cette croûte élastique était agitée par des mouvements alternatifs
… C'est peut-être par un de ces affaissements du sol que les forêts et les
grandes masses végétales … se trouvaient submergées et que les herbes et
arbustes … qui constituent la houille se sont accumulés.
[23] ‘Et il ne se trompait pas … Que l'on juge du développement
acquis par ces plantes chères aux milieux chauds et humides ...
Mais la végétation
… ne s'en tenait pas à ces champignons …; c'étaient les humbles arbustes de la
terre, avec des dimensions phénoménales, des lycopodes hauts de cent pieds, des
sigillaires géantes, des fougères arborescentes, grandes comme les sapins des
hautes latitudes, des lepidodendrons à tiges cylindriques bifurquées, terminées
par de longues feuilles et hérissées de poids rudes comme de monstrueuses
plantes grasses.
"Etonnant, magnifique, splendide! s'écria mon
oncle. Voilà toute la flore … de l'époque de transition … ces humbles plantes
de nos jardins qui se faisaient arbres aux premiers siècles du globe!"' (ch. 30)
[24] ‘les arbres de haute futaie font complément défaut … Des
cryptogames, dont nos Champignons actuels peuvent nous donner l'idée, devaient
former la plus grande partie de cette végétation primitive (p. 68) ... Les
Lycopodes sont des végétaux herbacées … [prédominant] tant par la dimension des
individus que par la variété et le nombre de leurs espèces.’ (p. 71)
[25] 'd'immenses
Sigillaria' (p. 83); 'Les Lepidodendrons [avec] des
tiges cylindriques bifurquées' (p. 87)
[26] ‘Les vapeurs enveloppent la terre, qui peu à peu ne forme
plus qu'une masse gazeuse, portée au rouge blanc, grosse comme le soleil et
brillante comme lui!
Au centre de cette
nébuleuse, quatorze cent mille fois plus considérable que ce globe qu'elle va
former un jour, je suis entraîné dans les espaces planétaires!’ (ch. 32)
[27] ‘Il faut donc se représenter notre planète primitive comme …
matière entièrement gazeuse. Et si l'on réfléchit que les substances portées à
l'état de gaz occupent un volume dix-huit cents fois plus grand qu'à l'état
solide, on en conclura que cette masse gazeuse devait être aussi grosse que le
soleil, lequel est quatorze cent mille fois plus gros que la terre actuelle.’
[28] 'La tête
d'un Lézard, les dents d'un Crocodile, les vertèbres d'un poisson … et les
nageoires de la Baleine.' (p. 159)
[29] 'l'oeil
sanglant de l'ichthyosaurus, gros comme la tête d'un
homme … La nature l'a doué d'un appareil d'optique d'une extrême puissance et
capable de résister à la pression des couches d'eau dans les profondeurs qu'il
habite.' (ch. 33)
[30] 'leur
volume excédait souvent celui de la tête d'un homme'; 'la force nécessaire pour
supporter la pression considérable des hauts fonds [sic] des mers' (p.
160).
[31] 'une
tortue large de quarante pieds et un serpent de trente pieds … un plesiosaurus, serpent à tronc cylindrique, à queue courte,
qui a les pattes disposées en forme de rame' (ch. 33).
[32] This inference was based on
splintered remains of smaller individuals found in coprolites (fossilized
excrement) of larger ones and the presence of complete skeletons of small
ichthyosaurs in the 'stomach' of adult ichthyosaurs. The latter are now thought
to be in the birth canal rather than the digestive tract (Alfred S. Romer, Vertebrate Paleontology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 119).
[33] Martin J. S. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Repesentations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 47.
[34] '25 vues idéales de paysages de l'ancien monde'.
[35] De la Beche's
original drawing showed the two combatants, with an inconspicuous ichthyosaur
in the background spouting from a single blowhole.
[36] ‘Je connais l'histoire de la rotule d'Ajax, du prétendu
corps d'Oreste retrouvé par les Spartiates, et du corps d'Asterius,
long de dix coudées, dont parle Pausanias. J'ai lu les rapports sur le
squelette de Trapani découvert au XIVe siècle, et
dans lequel on voulait reconnaître Polyphème, et l'histoire du géant déterré
pendant le XVIe siècle aux environs de Palerme. Vous
n'ignorez pas plus que moi, messieurs, l'analyse faite auprès de Lucerne, en
1577, de ces grands ossements que le célèbre médecin Félix Plater
déclarait appartenir à un géant de dix-neuf pieds! J'ai dévoré les traités de Cassanion, et tous ces mémoires, brochures, discours et contre-discours publiés à propos du squelette du roi des
Cimbres, Teutobochus, l'envahisseur de la Gaule,
exhumé d'une sablonnière du Dauphiné en 1613! Au XVIIIe
siècle, j'aurais combattu avec Pierre Campet
l'existence des préadamites de Scheuchzer!’ (ch. 38)
[37] 'quelque protopithèque, de quelque mésopithèque
semblable à celui que découvrit M. Lartet dans le gîte ossifère
de Sansan!' (ch. 39)
[38] 'gîte ossifère de Sansan'.
[39] ‘De grands palmiers, d'espèces aujourd'hui disparues, de
superbes palmacites, des pins, des ifs, des cyprès,
des thuyas … Un tapis de mousses et d'hépatiques revêtait moelleusement le sol
… confondus et entremêlées [avec] des arbres des contrées si différentes de la
surface du globe, le chêne croissant près du palmier, l'eucalyptus australien
s'appuyant au sapin de la Norvège, le bouleau du Nord confondant ses branches
avec les branches du kauris zélandais.’ (ch. 39)
[40] 'se
dressaient de hauts Palmiers, d'espèces aujourd'hui disparues, comme les … Palmacites … beaucoup d'arbres verts … les Sapins, les
Pins, les Ifs, et surtout des Cyprès, des Thuyas' (p. 266)
[41] 'Des Hépatiques et des Mousses croissent dans les lieux humides'.
[42] 'l'époque des fleurs .. embellie par leur couleurs diaprées'.
[43] Charles C. Gillespie, Genesis
and Geology: The Impact of Scientific Discoveries on Religious Beliefs in the
Decades before Darwin (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1951).
[44] Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History
of Paleontology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976).
[45] Michael Ruse, The
Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979).
[46] Anthony Hallam, Great
Geological Controversies (London: Oxford University Press).
[47] Ruse, Revolution, p. 67-70
[48] ‘Sans doute, notre globe a été le théâtre de fréquentes
catastrophes: d'immenses déchirures ont éventre son écorce solide, et des
éruptions se sont fait jour à travers ces abîmes; ces grands mouvements ont
ébranlé le sol, noyé des continents, creusé des vallées profondes et fait surgir
de hautes montagnes. Mais tous ces phénomènes, malgré leur puissance et leur
redoutable intensité, ne pouvaient s'étendre au globe tout entier ... Leur
action était nécessairement locale.’ (p. xiv)
[49] ‘Les espèces organiques sont mortes tout naturellement, de
leur belle mort … Le Maître souverain qui a créé les espèces animales et
végétales [l’]a voulu … C'est d'après un plan émane de sa toute-puissance et de
sa sagesse … les races ont fait place à d'autres ... [plus] perfectionnées …
accord important de la géologie et de la révélation … les découvertes récentes
… ont … justifié de cette manière le récit de l'historien sacré.
… Rien n'est plus propre que l'étude de
géologie à mettre en évidence … la puissance créatrice de Dieu … Au sinistre
chaos succède un globe encore incandescent, qui se modèle en formes régulières,
et se refroidit assez pour donner accès à la vie organique … Sa brûlante
surface … se couvre … et se décore d'arbustes et de forêts; les continents et
les mers prennent leurs limites définitives … Aux premiers êtres … succèdent
des êtres de plus en plus achevés; jusqu'à ce que Dieu fasse sortir de ses
mains créatrices, son dernier ouvrage, l'homme, orné de cet attribut suprême de
l'intelligence, par lequel il domine toute la nature et la soumet à ses lois.’
(p. xv-xvi)
[50] ‘des empreintes d'animaux primitives. Depuis la veille, la
création avait fait un progrès évident. Au lieu des trilobites rudimentaires,
j'apercevais des débris d'un ordre plus parfait; entre autres, des poissons
Ganoïdes … Il devenait évident que nous remontions l'échelle de la vie animale
dont l'homme occupe le sommet.’ (ch. 20)
[51] Ruse, Revolution, p. 108-109; Gillespie, Genesis,
p. 174-176.
[52] 'ne
renferme que des espèces fossiles, dans lesquelles les poisons comme les reptiles
sont d'autant plus parfaits que leur création est plus ancienne' (ch.
32) ; 'Les sauriens actuels, alligators ou crocodile, les plus gros et les
plus redoutables, ne sont que des réductions affaiblies de leurs pères des
premiers âges' (ch. 33)
[53] '[des]
gigantesques glyptodons de la période pliocène dont la tortue moderne n'est
plus qu'une petite réduction' (ch. 37).
[54] 'incontestablement caucasique' (ch. 38).
[55] Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company), p. 82-84. Orthognathous skulls have facial
angles between 85°-93° and prognathous skulls,
between 70°-80°.
[56] ‘ce monde fossile renaît dans mon imagination. Je me reporte
aux époques bibliques de la création, bien avant la naissance de l'homme,
lorsque la terre incomplète ne pouvait lui suffire encore’ (ch. 32).
[57] Butcher, Journey, p.
xxi
[58] Charles Lyell,
The Geological Evidences for the Antiquity of Man (Philadelphia: George
W. Childs, 1863), p. 405.
[59] Rudwick, Fossils, and Ruse, Revolution,
explain this apparent paradox.
[60] 'N'est-il
pas constant que le nombre des volcans a considérablement diminué depuis les
premiers jours du monde? et, si chaleur centrale il y a, ne peut-on en conclure
qu'elle tend à s'affaiblir?' (ch. 6)
[61] 'la terre
se refroidit peu à peu aux premiers jours du monde, la diminution de son volume
produisit dans l'écorce des dislocations, des ruptures, des retraits, des
fendilles' (ch. 22).
[62] 'quel
devait être l'aspect de la terre aux premiers siècles de sa formation, quand,
sous l'action de la chaleur et de l'humidité, le règne végétal se développait
seul à sa surface!' (ch. 32).
[63] 'à
l'époque quaternaire, des troubles considérables se manifestaient encore dans
l'écorce terrestre; le refroidissement continu du globe produisait des
cassures, des fentes, des failles' (ch. 38).
[64]
Gillespie, Genesis and
Geology.
[65] 'Quelles
sont les causes qui ont produit les reliefs actuels du globe?'; 'La cause
primordiale c'est, comme nous l'avons dit si souvent, le refroidissement de la
terre … les plis, les ridements et les fractures ... ont provoqué la formation
des principales montagnes ... qui ont eu pour résultat de créer de nouveaux
continents en comblant le bassin des mers anciennes.’ (p. 477)
[66] Ruse, Revolution.
[67] Robert Chambers, Vestiges
of the Natural History of Creation (Churchill: London, 1844), p. 197.
Reprinted in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other
Evolutionary Writings by Robert Chambers, edited with a new introduction by
James A. Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
[68] Gillespie, Genesis and
Geology, p. 294.
[69] Rudwick,
Fossils, p. 203.
[70] Rudwick,
Scenes, p.173.
[71] Ruse, Revolution.
[72] Gillespie, Genesis and
Geology.
[73] '"ce fait peut s'expliquer
géologiquement. A une certaine époque, la terre n'était formée que d'une écorce
élastique, soumise à des mouvements alternatifs de hauts et de bas, en vertu
des lois de l'attraction. Il est probable que des affaissements du sol se sont
produits, et qu'une partie des terrains sédimentaires a été entraînée au fond
des gouffres subitement ouverts."' (ch. 30)
[74] Dumas, Correspondance,
p. 47.