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THE “Voyages Extraordinaires” of M. Jules Verne deserve to
be made widely known in English-speaking countries by means of carefully
prepared translations. Witty and ingenious adaptations of the researches and
discoveries of modern science to the popular taste, which demands that these
should be presented to ordinary readers in the lighter form of cleverly mingled
truth and fiction, these books will assuredly be read with profit and delight,
especially by English youth. Certainly no writer before M. Jules Verne has been
so happy in weaving together in judicious combination severe scientific truth
with a charming exercise of playful imagination.
Iceland, the starting point of the marvellous underground journey
imagined in this volume, is invested at the present time with. a painful
interest in consequence of the disastrous eruptions last Easter Day, which
covered with lava and ashes the poor and scanty vegetation upon which four
thousand persons were partly dependent for the means of subsistence. For a long
time to come the natives of that interesting island, who cleave to their desert
home with all that amor patriae which is so much more easily
understood than explained, will look, and look not in vain, for the help of
those on whom fall the smiles of a kindlier sun in regions not torn by
earthquakes nor blasted and ravaged by volcanic fires. Will the readers of this
little book, who, are gifted with the means of indulging in the luxury of
extended beneficence, remember the distress of their brethren in the far north,
whom distance has not barred from the claim of being counted our
“neighbours”? And whatever their humane feelings may prompt them to
bestow will be gladly added to the Mansion-House Iceland Relief Fund.
In his desire to ascertain how far the picture of Iceland, drawn in the
work of Jules Verne is a correct one, the translator hopes in the course of a
mail or two to receive a communication from a leading man of science in the
island, which may furnish matter for additional information in a future
edition.
The scientific portion of the French original is not without a few
errors, which the translator, with the kind assistance of Mr. Cameron of H. M.
Geological Survey, has ventured to point out and correct. It is scarcely to be
expected in a work in which the element of amusement is intended to enter more
largely than that of scientific instruction, that any great degree of accuracy
should be arrived at. Yet the translator hopes that what trifling deviations
from the text or corrections in foot notes he is responsible for, will have
done a little towards the increased usefulness of the work.
F. A. M.
The Vicarage,
Broughton-in-Furness
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