" These venturesome and arbitrary
conjectures have given rise, in wholly unscientific circles, to still more
fantastic notions. The hollow sphere has by degrees been peopled with
plants and animals, and two small subterranean revolving planets -- Pluto
and Proserpine -- were imaginatively supposed to shed over it their mild
light; as, however, it was further imagined that an ever-uniform temperature
reigned in these internal regions, the air, which was made self-luminous by
compression, might well render the planets of this lower world unnecessary.
Near the north pole, at 80 degrees latitude, whence the polar light
emanates, was an enormous opening, through which a descent might be made
into the hollow sphere, and Sir Humphrey Davy and myself were even publicly
and frequently invited by Captain Symmes to enter upon this subterranean
expedition: so powerful is the morbid inclination of men to fill unknown
spaces with shapes of wonder, totally unmindful of the counter evidence
furnished by well-attested facts and universally acknowledged natural laws.
Even the celebrated Halley, at the end of the seventeenth century, hollowed
out the Earth in his magnetic speculations. Men were invited to believe
that a subterranean freely-rotating nucleus occasions by its position the
diurnal and annual changes of magnetic declination.
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