Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/127

Rh is, that the English and German geographers have abandoned the routes they formerly advocated, and have, with great unanimity, united in recommending that the English expedition which left last June, under the command of Captain Nares, should go through Smith's Sound, following up the track of Kane, Hayes, and Hall—the route that has been uniformly urged by the American Geographical Society as the best. At a crowded meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, at which the officers of the expedition and most of the distinguished arctic explorers were present, the American theory of polar approach was heartily commended:

To show that, in this boasted scientific age, geographical notions are still entertained as crude as those held five hundred years ago, Judge Daly gives an account of some of the theories that are still seriously advocated. One of these is described as follows:

"In a letter put forth last February, by Mr. Symmes, he not only argues that the earth is hollow, but that it has as much inhabitable surface within as without. He imagines that the inside is inhabited by human beings who are the progenitors of the white race, now upon the outer surface, and that there are apertures at the poles four or more hundred miles in diameter. This recalls the belief as to the cause of the earth's motion in the middle ages, when it became apparent from the researches of Copernicus and Galileo that it revolved upon its axis, which accounted for the motion by supposing that the interior of the earth was hollow, and was the place to which the damned were condemned, who produced the motion by their continual attempts to climb up the inside of this hollow ball in their fruitless