PREFACE



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