![]() ![]() In a somewhat different way, Symmes’s conviction that there were openings at the poles also led to the establishment of perhaps the most famous American naval scientific expedition, the "United States Exploring Expedition" which was commissioned to explore the South Pacific and led to the establishment of a national museum of natural history - the Smithsonian Institute. Symmes's theories led to a number of fictional visions of the "world within", most immediately, Adam Seaborn's 1820 novel Symzonia - a work which has often been attributed to Symmes himself and the novel with its diagrams and drawings was for some time cited as evidence that the world is hollow. The fortunes of the idea that the Earth was "hollow and habitable within," from classical references to the underworld to esoteric and New Age writers today, have been recounted elsewhere, most notably by Walter Kafton-Minkel in his Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the earth (1989). ![]()
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