Part 3

It is a generally believed assertion that the Earth has been a molten mass at or near its origin, except from the rather doubtful story of creation related in first chapter of Genesis, where it appears that the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. When or how they were created, the story fails to relate. But, admitting the waters to prevail to such an extent as to incline God’s spirit for a voyage thereon, would make the idea of a molten Earth rather improbable.

The Earth is said to be undergoing a cooling process for the past thousands of years, but at some remote time in the past it was covered with ice and traversed by glaciers.

There are various explanations of the phenomena of icebergs, glaciers, volcanoes, the Gulf Stream, and why the Mediterranean Sea does not fill up or change its conditions through the thousands of years known to history. The philosophy of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, increase of heat in digging deep in the earth, artesian wells, springs and lakes, all have various solutions for being as they are, but this discussion proposes to throw into the waste-basket nearly all of the accepted conclusions on the subject, and, in order to go to an extreme limit of Crankism, will dispute the law of Attraction of Gravitation. To dispute the long accepted conclusions on most of these topics would be presumptuous without an effort to give good and sufficient reason for such skepticism.

The first element to consider will be fire, or heat, without which, it seems safe to assert, nothing can be produced from the Earth, or by the devices of man. To draw a base line to work from, we will begin at the polar center of the Earth’s motion. The Earth, unlike any other object that perpetually revolves that we see or know of, does not have a shaft, or axle, or anything to create friction, and, therefore, heat. There is but one word in the English language that tells what will produce heat; that is friction, which may claim motion for its parentage. Now, this proposition is offered for a starting point. All heat is produced by friction, in the absence of which there can be no heat. This claim made, and presumably well established, how can there be any central heat of the Earth, revolving on nothing but an imaginary center? Will any scientist explain at what point heat begins to generate? It would appear as difficult as to accurately fix the point where moral responsibility commences in a child, or just when the wheel of time will cease to revolve. At whatever point heat begins, is it supposable that it works internally or outward? Any observing mind can give but one answer.

It is claimed, to prove the molten condition of the Earth’s interior, that the various borings for artesian wells and diggings in mines show a uniform increase of heat as greater depths are attained. All these ratios of increase differ somewhat in different localities, but not enough to have ever banished the idea that at a few thousand feet of depth everything would be a liquid mass. This idea ought to be absurd enough to make a brazen image smile.

Let us consider what these explorations into the bowels of the Earth amount to. The deepest holes bored or dug are, without exception, less than a mile deep. Admitting a mile, that is 1-4000 of the distance toward the center. Imagine a puncture on an orange, or on a ball eight inches in diameter being four inches to the center. Is there any man living could see a hole as small in proportion to its size to 1-4000 of one-half of its diameter? How insignificant such a test. Reasons for this delusion will be given later on, under treatment of Volcanoes.

Again, the Earth’s surface is covered with at least four-fifths water at depths ranging from one to five miles, including the millions of springs, lakes and rivers on land, to say nothing of the inexhaustible quantities of water encountered in the aforesaid boring and mining operations.

The deepest explorations in mines are the salt mines of Poland, the Calumet and Hecla copper mines and Comstock Lode. These have all been on trail of some mineral deposit formed by some remote work of Nature in the undefinable past, when volcanic or other influences in Nature’s laboratory left their deposit. These are the only places that man has explored, only insignificant depths, and formed extravagant conclusions of the rest of the way.

But let us go back to the oceans, with their great depths and extended areas, and what do we find? It is this: Whether on the Equator or on the coasts of Greenland, in the tropics or frigid latitudes the same, that at the deepest sea soundings the temperature is near or below the freezing point, being literally liquid ice. These temperatures are at depths of five times as deep as anybody has bored or dug, and cover four-fifths of the Earth’s surface, and, instead of being hot, or even warm, are extremely cold.

If the internal heat is as great as is claimed, it ought to be enough to set every drop of water in the oceans into a boiling condition inside of fifteen minutes, but there does not seem to be heat enough to warm the bottom of the kettle.

It is assumed that the earth originated in a nebulous form, or an aggregation of small starry bodies, or something else which nobody has as yet explained clearly.

It is evident that our Earth has come into its present form through a vast amount of time and changes, and is made up largely of liquids and plastic substances, which must have had an existence in its origin. There is little doubt but that all its composition has been revolving through space in some form for countless millions of years with its mixtures of liquid, gaseous and solid constituents.

It does not need a long argument to demonstrate that bodies in such revolutions as the earth is making have a tendency, by centrifugal force, to throw the heavier elements to the outside, and as this seems to be a universal law in all scientific experiments by man, it seems reasonable to suppose the earth’s centrifugal forces are no exception in their results. Such being the case, leads at once to the supposition and probability that the Earth is a hollow globe, and not a solid mass, with points of actual poles at each end that can be explored.

As water is, and has been in all history we know of, so large a part of the earth’s mass, the object of this writing is to show the wonderful influence it exerts in the world’s affairs, and the ample provision Nature has in store, and where it is stored, for man, and animals, and vegetation to bank on.

But, in passing, it is just that a name for many recent years that has been a subject for ridicule should be noticed with profound respect for his wise and superior observations. This man for whom I wish to speak a word of commendation and admiration is Captain John Cleves Symmes, who I am prepared to allow the honor of first advancing the theory that the Earth is hollow, and has been held up as the authority for finding “Symmes’s Hole.” While the present writer had never seen or read any of his arguments for such a hole, the idea came originally, as if never thought of by my worthy predecessor. To avoid any charge of plagiarism, this topic will, therefore, be treated as if never before thought of.

Assuming that the Earth is hollow, the purpose will be in the following pages to show how and why, and the great importance to the inhabitants of the outside that it should be so. The first proposition is, therefore, a hollow Earth from causes heretofore named by centrifugal force; next, that the inside is an ocean of fresh water, with continents of land, and the outside oceans of salt water and its continents, as we have partially learned of them.

That the ice belts in each frigid zone are the dividing lines between salt and fresh water. That openings at the approach to either pole are at least 1,500 miles across, and that a magnetic compass above a latitude of eighty to eighty-eight degrees will not keep its natural position at any point within such latitude, but will, in its endeavor to point the needle to the true center of motion, lift up the point in order to keep the right bearing, or show some other embarrassment or irregularity. Whoever explores at these latitudes is, instead of going in a course directly to the center of motion, unconsciously rounding a circle toward the inside.

The flattened condition of the Earth at the poles goes to accommodate both the claims of being hollow and how it came to be so.

We are informed that every raindrop is hollow falling through a short amount of space, and how more reasonable to suppose the Earth’s great mass to be so, revolving in an eternity of space.

It is more than presumable to suppose that every planetary body in the universe is hollow, and made so by the same fixed law for all flexible bodies in revolution to become hollow. Are not the rings of Saturn thus produced?

Here is a planet they tell us is seven hundred times as large as the Earth, but its density only ninety times as great. His mean diameter about 70,000 miles and compression one-tenth, so that the polar diameter is 3,500 miles less, and the equatorial 3,500 miles more than its mean, thus duplicating largely the shape and globular form of the Earth. Is it not reasonable, then, to suppose that the lack of density has allowed its revolutions to produce its series of rings, those most dense being outside? And the whole order being such, that our position allows us to look through them instead of on to an outside surface?

Jupiter has the same characteristics in diameters. The mean, 85,000 miles; equatorial, 87,800; polar, 82,200, a difference of 5,600 miles, which means the same influences and same reason to make it hollow. While 1,233 times as large as the Earth, its density of substance is only 301 times as much. Here we have the two largest planets, perhaps yet in their period of development for being inhabited, in very like form relatively as the Earth.

It may not be ill-timed to assert at this point the belief that all planetary bodies are hollow and cool, not one in a molten condition or giving out heat, but only generating heat in their own atmospheres, thus giving out light, which we, in our ignorance, attribute to a mass of intense heat or a globe in combustion. Such a condition seems unreasonable to exist in a body traveling unlimited space, which is cold beyond any degree of ascertaining. The sun is subject to the same conditions as the Earth, as far as obtaining heat, and this work will claim that we receive no more direct heat from the Sun than from Mars or Venus.

Taking the first proposition, that in the absence of friction there can be no heat or light, the assumption is that the Sun generates its heat and light by its wonderful revolution in its own atmosphere. With a diameter of 860,000 miles, and revolving in 25.38 days, the Sun is moving through its atmosphere a mile in eight-tenths of a second, and seventy-five miles a minute, and 4,500 per hour.

With an atmosphere of relative density of the Earth’s, it is easy to see what a pyrotechnical and electrical display this would reveal to the lens of a telescope, giving the impression of fire on an inconceivable magnitude. It seems unreasonable that in the realm of Nature anything, or that anywhere fuel can be found for an eternal fire except in an old orthodox Hell.

To an observer on Mars or Venus, the earth would, no doubt, present the same starlike appearance that those planets do to our earthly eyes.

The electrical sparks on a trolley wire or dynamo give the same expression to our eyes, though in miniature, with no consciousness of heat to our feelings.

It is doubtful if, with all the observations of the Sun by telescopes, we have gained any knowledge of its structure, but only of its revolutions, size and movements, the same as the Earth. It would be a very difficult subject to diagnose clearly as to its productions of animal and vegetable life. The electrical influences through an atmosphere proportionally deep with ours, with its clouds that must exist in the same, could very thoroughly obscure the surface of the Sun. Unless at special intervals, when certain exposures would be called Sun-spots, either on a great space of continent or ocean.