Journey to the Center of the Earth

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, also translated as A Journey to the Interior of the Earth, is a classic 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story involves a professor who leads his nephew and hired guide down a volcano in Iceland to the "centre of the Earth". They encounter many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy. The living organisms they meet reflects the geological time; just as the rock layers become older and older the deeper one gets, the animals get more and more ancient the closer the characters come to the center. From a scientific point of view, this story has not aged quite as well as other Verne stories, since most of his ideas about what the interior of the Earth contains have since been proven wrong. However, a redeeming point to the story is Verne's own belief, told within the novel from the viewpoint of a character, that the inside of the Earth does indeed differ from that which the characters encounter. One of Verne's main ideas with his stories was also to educate the readers, and by placing the different extinct creatures the characters meet in their correct geological era, he is able to show how the world looked like millions of years ago, stretching from the ice age to the dinosaurs.