Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio Read Online Free PDF

that helped further acceptance of the Copernican system, appeared in not one but two English translations in 1688. “I shou’d think it very strange,” he wrote, “that the Earth shou’d be inhabited as it is; and the other Planets shou’d be so entirely desolate and deserted.” He enumerates the vast variety of life on earth, down to those “thousands of small living Creatures” seen through the microscope, and then asks, “After this, can you believe, that Nature, who has been fruitful to Excess as to the Earth, is barren to all the rest of the Planets?”
    This notion of an “abundant Providence,” the idea that creation must be as copious as possible because that would logically be part of the Creator’s plan, was a commonplace in seventeenth-century theology. Halley uses it, seemingly taking inspiration from de Fontenelle to make an argument for a more abundant creation within the earth:
    Since we see all the parts of the Creation abound with Animate Beings, as the Air with Birds and Flies, the Water with the numerous varieties of Fish, and the very Earth with Reptiles of so many sorts; all whose ways of living would be to us incredible did not daily Experience teach us. Why then should we think it strange that the prodigious Mass of Matter, whereof this Globe does consist, should be capable of some other improvement than barely to serve to support its Surface? Why may not we rather suppose that the exceeding small quantity of solid Matter in respect to the fluid Ether, is so disposed by the Almighty Wisdom as to yield as great a Surface for the use of living Creatures as can consist with the conveniency and security of the whole.
     
    An inner sphere would provide more room for life.
    But, he notes, ever aware of skeptics, some will say there can be no life down there without light “and therefore all this apparatus of our inward Globes must be useless.” He admits he doesn’t have a solid response to this one and says, a bit defensively, “To this I answer that there are many ways of producing Light which we are wholly ignorant of,” and offers some possibilities: the medium itself may be “luminous after the manner of our Ignes fatui. ” This is the Latin term for the phosphorescent light that hovers over swampy ground at night, sometimes known as will-’o-the-wisp. Seems like a stretch. A better possibility comes next: “The Concave Arches may in several places shine with such a substance as invests the Surface of the Sun.” But he does not suggest what the substance may consist of and ultimately falls back on the unknown: “Nor can we, without a boldness unbecoming a Philosopher, adventure to affect the impossibility of peculiar Luminaries below, of which we have no sort of Idea. ” There may be a source of light down there beyond guessing about up here. Gently parodying the common academic appeal to ancient authority, he adds that “the Poets Virgil and Claudian have gone before me in this Thought, inlightning their Elysian Fields with Sun and Stars proper to those infernal, or rather internal, Regions.” He quotes two lines from book six of the Aeneid:
    Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit
Purpureo; Solemque suum sua Sidera norunt.
(As translated by Robert Fitzgerald in 1983)
     
     
    Wider expanses of high air endow
Each vista with a wealth of light. Souls here
Posess their own familiar sun and stars.
    And three from book two of Claudian’s The Rape of Proserpine:
    Amissum ne crede diem, sunt altera nobis
Sidera, sunt orbes alii, lumenque videbis
Purius, Elysiumque magis Mirabere Solem.
(As translated by Jacob George Strutt in 1814)
     
     
    … Think not to thee the light of day
For ever lost: we own a glorious sun;
And other stars adorn our firmament,
With purest splendor. How wilt thou admire
The beaming radiance of Elysian skies;
    Halley comments, wryly: “And though this be not to be esteemed as an Argument, yet I may take the liberty I see others do, to quote the