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Home -> Jules Verne -> A Journey to the Center of the Earth -> Chapter 38

A Journey to the Center of the Earth - Chapter 38

1. Preface

2. Chapter 1

3. Chapter 2

4. Chapter 3

5. Chapter 4

6. Chapter 5

7. Chapter 6

8. Chapter 7

9. Chapter 8

10. Chapter 9

11. Chapter 10

12. Chapter 11

13. Chapter 12

14. Chapter 13

15. Chapter 14

16. Chapter 15

17. Chapter 16

18. Chapter 17

19. Chapter 18

20. Chapter 19

21. Chapter 20

22. Chapter 21

23. Chapter 22

24. Chapter 23

25. Chapter 24

26. Chapter 25

27. Chapter 26

28. Chapter 27

29. Chapter 28

30. Chapter 29

31. Chapter 30

32. Chapter 31

33. Chapter 32

34. Chapter 33

35. Chapter 34

36. Chapter 35

37. Chapter 36

38. Chapter 37

39. Chapter 38

40. Chapter 39

41. Chapter 40

42. Chapter 41

43. Chapter 42

44. Chapter 43

45. Chapter 44

46. Chapter 45







CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE PROFESSOR IN HIS CHAIR AGAIN

To understand this apostrophe of my uncle's, made to absent French
savants, it will be necessary to allude to an event of high
importance in a palaeontological point of view, which had occurred a
little while before our departure.

On the 28th of March, 1863, some excavators working under the
direction of M. Boucher de Perthes, in the stone quarries of Moulin
Quignon, near Abbeville, in the department of Somme, found a human
jawbone fourteen feet beneath the surface. It was the first fossil of
this nature that had ever been brought to light. Not far distant were
found stone hatchets and flint arrow-heads stained and encased by
lapse of time with a uniform coat of rust.

The noise of this discovery was very great, not in France alone, but
in England and in Germany. Several savants of the French Institute,
and amongst them MM. Milne-Edwards and de Quatrefages, saw at once
the importance of this discovery, proved to demonstration the
genuineness of the bone in question, and became the most ardent
defendants in what the English called this 'trial of a jawbone.' To
the geologists of the United Kingdom, who believed in the certainty
of the fact--Messrs. Falconer, Busk, Carpenter, and others--
scientific Germans were soon joined, and amongst them the forwardest,
the most fiery, and the most enthusiastic, was my uncle Liedenbrock.

Therefore the genuineness of a fossil human relic of the quaternary
period seemed to be incontestably proved and admitted.

It is true that this theory met with a most obstinate opponent in M.
Elie de Beaumont. This high authority maintained that the soil of
Moulin Quignon was not diluvial at all, but was of much more recent
formation; and, agreeing in that with Cuvier, he refused to admit
that the human species could be contemporary with the animals of the
quaternary period. My uncle Liedenbrock, along with the great body of
the geologists, had maintained his ground, disputed, and argued,
until M. Elie de Beaumont stood almost alone in his opinion.

We knew all these details, but we were not aware that since our
departure the question had advanced to farther stages. Other similar
maxillaries, though belonging to individuals of various types and
different nations, were found in the loose grey soil of certain
grottoes in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, as well as weapons,
tools, earthen utensils, bones of children and adults. The existence
therefore of man in the quaternary period seemed to become daily more
certain.

Nor was this all. Fresh discoveries of remains in the pleiocene
formation had emboldened other geologists to refer back the human
species to a higher antiquity still. It is true that these remains
were not human bones, but objects bearing the traces of his
handiwork, such as fossil leg-bones of animals, sculptured and carved
evidently by the hand of man.

Thus, at one bound, the record of the existence of man receded far
back into the history of the ages past; he was a predecessor of the
mastodon; he was a contemporary of the southern elephant; he lived a
hundred thousand years ago, when, according to geologists, the
pleiocene formation was in progress.

Such then was the state of palaeontological science, and what we knew
of it was sufficient to explain our behaviour in the presence of this
stupendous Golgotha. Any one may now understand the frenzied
excitement of my uncle, when, twenty yards farther on, he found
himself face to face with a primitive man!

It was a perfectly recognisable human body. Had some particular soil,
like that of the cemetery St. Michel, at Bordeaux, preserved it thus
for so many ages? It might be so. But this dried corpse, with its
parchment-like skin drawn tightly over the bony frame, the limbs
still preserving their shape, sound teeth, abundant hair, and finger
and toe nails of frightful length, this desiccated mummy startled us
by appearing just as it had lived countless ages ago. I stood mute
before this apparition of remote antiquity. My uncle, usually so
garrulous, was struck dumb likewise. We raised the body. We stood it
up against a rock. It seemed to stare at us out of its empty orbits.
We sounded with our knuckles his hollow frame.

After some moments' silence the Professor was himself again. Otto
Liedenbrock, yielding to his nature, forgot all the circumstances of
our eventful journey, forgot where we were standing, forgot the
vaulted cavern which contained us. No doubt he was in mind back again
in his Johannaeum, holding forth to his pupils, for he assumed his
learned air; and addressing himself to an imaginary audience, he
proceeded thus:

"Gentlemen, I have the honour to introduce to you a man of the
quaternary or post-tertiary system. Eminent geologists have denied
his existence, others no less eminent have affirmed it. The St.
Thomases of palaeontology, if they were here, might now touch him with
their fingers, and would be obliged to acknowledge their error. I am
quite aware that science has to be on its guard with discoveries of
this kind. I know what capital enterprising individuals like Barnum
have made out of fossil men. I have heard the tale of the kneepan of
Ajax, the pretended body of Orestes claimed to have been found by the
Spartans, and of the body of Asterius, ten cubits long, of which
Pausanias speaks. I have read the reports of the skeleton of Trapani,
found in the fourteenth century, and which was at the time identified
as that of Polyphemus; and the history of the giant unearthed in the
sixteenth century near Palermo. You know as well as I do, gentlemen,
the analysis made at Lucerne in 1577 of those huge bones which the
celebrated Dr. Felix Plater affirmed to be those of a giant nineteen
feet high. I have gone through the treatises of Cassanion, and all
those memoirs, pamphlets, answers, and rejoinders published
respecting the skeleton of Teutobochus, the invader of Gaul, dug out
of a sandpit in the Dauphine, in 1613. In the eighteenth century I
would have stood up for Scheuchzer's pre-adamite man against Peter
Campet. I have perused a writing, entitled Gigan--"

Here my uncle's unfortunate infirmity met him--that of being unable
in public to pronounce hard words.

"The pamphlet entitled Gigan--"

He could get no further.

"Giganteo--"

It was not to be done. The unlucky word would not come out. At the
Johannaeum there would have been a laugh.

"Gigantosteologie," at last the Professor burst out, between two
words which I shall not record here.

Then rushing on with renewed vigour, and with great animation:

"Yes, gentlemen, I know all these things, and more. I know that
Cuvier and Blumenbach have recognised in these bones nothing more
remarkable than the bones of the mammoth and other mammals of the
post-tertiary period. But in the presence of this specimen to doubt
would be to insult science. There stands the body! You may see it,
touch it. It is not a mere skeleton; it is an entire body, preserved
for a purely anthropological end and purpose."

I was good enough not to contradict this startling assertion.

"If I could only wash it in a solution of sulphuric acid," pursued my
uncle, "I should be able to clear it from all the earthy particles
and the shells which are incrusted about it. But I do not possess
that valuable solvent. Yet, such as it is, the body shall tell us its
own wonderful story."

Here the Professor laid hold of the fossil skeleton, and handled it
with the skill of a dexterous showman.

"You see," he said, "that it is not six feet long, and that we are
still separated by a long interval from the pretended race of giants.
As for the family to which it belongs, it is evidently Caucasian. It
is the white race, our own. The skull of this fossil is a regular
oval, or rather ovoid. It exhibits no prominent cheekbones, no
projecting jaws. It presents no appearance of that prognathism which
diminishes the facial angle. [1] Measure that angle. It is nearly
ninety degrees. But I will go further in my deductions, and I will
affirm that this specimen of the human family is of the Japhetic
race, which has since spread from the Indies to the Atlantic. Don't
smile, gentlemen."

Nobody was smiling; but the learned Professor was frequently
disturbed by the broad smiles provoked by his learned eccentricities.

"Yes," he pursued with animation, "this is a fossil man, the
contemporary of the mastodons whose remains fill this amphitheatre.
But if you ask me how he came there, how those strata on which he lay
slipped down into this enormous hollow in the globe, I confess I
cannot answer that question. No doubt in the post-tertiary period
considerable commotions were still disturbing the crust of the earth.
The long-continued cooling of the globe produced chasms, fissures,
clefts, and faults, into which, very probably, portions of the upper
earth may have fallen. I make no rash assertions; but there is the
man surrounded by his own works, by hatchets, by flint arrow-heads,
which are the characteristics of the stone age. And unless he came
here, like myself, as a tourist on a visit and as a pioneer of
science, I can entertain no doubt of the authenticity of his remote
origin."

[1] The facial angle is formed by two lines, one touching the brow
and the front teeth, the other from the orifice of the ear to the
lower line of the nostrils. The greater this angle, the higher
intelligence denoted by the formation of the skull. Prognathism is
that projection of the jaw-bones which sharpens or lessons this
angle, and which is illustrated in the negro countenance and in the
lowest savages.

The Professor ceased to speak, and the audience broke out into loud
and unanimous applause. For of course my uncle was right, and wiser
men than his nephew would have had some trouble to refute his
statements.

Another remarkable thing. This fossil body was not the only one in
this immense catacomb. We came upon other bodies at every step
amongst this mortal dust, and my uncle might select the most curious
of these specimens to demolish the incredulity of sceptics.

In fact it was a wonderful spectacle, that of these generations of
men and animals commingled in a common cemetery. Then one very
serious question arose presently which we scarcely dared to suggest.
Had all those creatures slided through a great fissure in the crust
of the earth, down to the shores of the Liedenbrock sea, when they
were dead and turning to dust, or had they lived and grown and died
here in this subterranean world under a false sky, just like
inhabitants of the upper earth? Until the present time we had seen
alive only marine monsters and fishes. Might not some living man,
some native of the abyss, be yet a wanderer below on this desert
strand?




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