"Are you afraid of being put into a state of fusion?"

"I will leave you to decide that question," I answered rather
sullenly. "This is my decision," replied Professor Liedenbrock,
putting on one of his grandest airs. "Neither you nor anybody else
knows with any certainty what is going on in the interior of this
globe, since not the twelve thousandth part of its radius is known;
science is eminently perfectible; and every new theory is soon routed
by a newer. Was it not always believed until Fourier that the
temperature of the interplanetary spaces decreased perpetually? and
is it not known at the present time that the greatest cold of the
ethereal regions is never lower than 40 degrees below zero Fahr.? Why
should it not be the same with the internal heat? Why should it not,
at a certain depth, attain an impassable limit, instead of rising to
such a point as to fuse the most infusible metals?"

As my uncle was now taking his stand upon hypotheses, of course,
there was nothing to be said.

"Well, I will tell you that true savants, amongst them Poisson, have
demonstrated that if a heat of 360,000 degrees [1] existed in the
interior of the globe, the fiery gases arising from the fused matter
would acquire an elastic force which the crust of the earth would be
unable to resist, and that it would explode like the plates of a
bursting boiler."

"That is Poisson's opinion, my uncle, nothing more."

"Granted. But it is likewise the creed adopted by other distinguished
geologists, that the interior of the globe is neither gas nor water,