EDITOR'S TABLE. 



109 



is, that the English and German geog- 

 rnphers have abandoned the routes 

 they formerly advocated, and have, 

 with great unanimity, united in recom- 

 mending that the English expedition 

 which left last June, under the com- 

 mand 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 Boyal Geographical So- 

 ciety, at which the officers of the expe- 

 dition and most of the distinguished 

 arctic explorers were present, the 

 American theory of polar approach 

 was heartily commended : 



" Admiral Ommanny, formerly a promi- 

 nent opponent of the route now adopted, 

 also said that England must be grateful to 

 her American cousins, who had cleared the 

 way by successful operations through Smith 

 Sound. When it is remembered that our 

 early efforts in this direction were ignored, 

 that the name of Grinnell Land, in Welling- 

 ton Channel, was at first cynitted upon Eng- 

 lish maps, and the name of a subsequent 

 English explorer substituted, that our route 

 by the way of Smith Sound received little 

 support except from Admiral Sherard Os- 

 born, Admiral Ingletield, and Mr. Clements 

 E. Markham, this change of opinion and 

 hearty recognition now are very gratifying, 

 especially to our member, Dr. Hayes, the 

 only one of our exploring commanders in 

 the Arctic who is now alive." 



To show that, in this boasted scien- 

 tific 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 : 



"About the year 1819, Captain J. C. 

 Symmes, an officer of the regular Army of 

 the United States, advanced a theory, to the 

 propagation of which he devoted the re- 

 mainder of his life, that the earth was hol- 

 low, was inhabited within, and had an 

 opening at the pole, which became known 

 throughout the country as ' Symmes' s Hole.' 

 He pressed the subject upon Congress, urged 

 an expedition to the pole to test bis theory, 



and a Kussian gentleman is said to have 

 offered to fit one out if Symmes would con- 

 duct it under the auspices of Kussia, which 

 the captain declined, on the ground that the 

 honor of establishing the theory should be- 

 long to the United States. He went over 

 the country, delivering lectures in support 

 of this theory, in which he firmly believed 

 to the day of his death. His son, now an 

 old man, has revived it, and is advocating 

 it, as his father did, by delivering public 

 lectures. The father's theory was, that this 

 hole or opening in the Arctic was about one 

 thousand miles in diameter, and somewhat 

 wider at the Antarctic ; and now that we 

 have reached within five hundred miles of 

 the arctic pole, about half of the assumed 

 diameter of the supposed hole, without any 

 indication so far of its existence, the son be- 

 lieves that if Captain Hall had got several 

 degrees farther north he would have found 

 evidence of the truth of the theory. 



" Captain Hall startled us at the reception 

 given to him and his officers by this Society, 

 before the departure of the Polaris, by an- 

 nouncing publicly to us bis belief in the ex- 

 istence of this bole, and of his determination 

 to go in pursuit of it ; a belief which, being 

 an uneducated man, and but little acquainted 

 with the geography of the Arctic, was firmly 

 fixed in his mind. It was in pursuit of this 

 supposed hole that he meant to attempt the 

 passage to the pole by the way of Jones's 

 Sound. 1 pointed out to him the impractica- 

 bility of an attempt through Jones's Sound, 

 and urged him to go as Kane and Hayes had 

 done, by the way of Smith Sound, which 

 course he ultimately adopted when advised 

 to the same effect by Baron van Otten of the 

 Swedish Expedition, whom he met during 

 his voyage at Holsteinberg in Davis Strait. 



" 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 in- 

 habitable 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 re- 

 calls 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 r suppos- 

 ing 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 in- 

 side of this hollow ball in their fruitless 



