The Mundane System
The Hollow Earth theories of John Cleves Symmes
John Cleves Symmes’ 1818 declaration that the earth is “hollow, and habitable within” was just the start of a long and fascinating episode in the annals of fringe science. But most accounts of Symmes’ work simply stop with the declaration, or perhaps note a few of the early memoirs or the novel Symmesonia, neglecting Symmes’ own decade-long development of the work. When I began to search for the texts of those initial memoirs, I was surprised to find that—just in the case of Emperor Norton’s declarations—not only was there a much more substantial literature to be explored, but there was […]