The Professor And His Family

: A Journey To The Interior Of The Earth

On the 24th of May, 1863, my uncle, Professor Liedenbrock, rushed

into his little house, No. 19 Konigstrasse, one of the oldest streets

in the oldest portion of the city of Hamburg.



Martha must have concluded that she was very much behindhand, for the

dinner had only just been put into the oven.



"Well, now," said I to myself, "if that most impatient of men is

hungry, what a disturbance he wi l make!"



"M. Liedenbrock so soon!" cried poor Martha in great alarm, half

opening the dining-room door.



"Yes, Martha; but very likely the dinner is not half cooked, for it

is not two yet. Saint Michael's clock has only just struck half-past

one."



"Then why has the master come home so soon?"



"Perhaps he will tell us that himself."



"Here he is, Monsieur Axel; I will run and hide myself while you

argue with him."



And Martha retreated in safety into her own dominions.



I was left alone. But how was it possible for a man of my undecided

turn of mind to argue successfully with so irascible a person as the

Professor? With this persuasion I was hurrying away to my own little

retreat upstairs, when the street door creaked upon its hinges; heavy

feet made the whole flight of stairs to shake; and the master of the

house, passing rapidly through the dining-room, threw himself in

haste into his own sanctum.



But on his rapid way he had found time to fling his hazel stick into

a corner, his rough broadbrim upon the table, and these few emphatic

words at his nephew:



"Axel, follow me!"



I had scarcely had time to move when the Professor was again shouting

after me:



"What! not come yet?"



And I rushed into my redoubtable master's study.



Otto Liedenbrock had no mischief in him, I willingly allow that; but

unless he very considerably changes as he grows older, at the end he

will be a most original character.



He was professor at the Johannaeum, and was delivering a series of

lectures on mineralogy, in the course of every one of which he broke

into a passion once or twice at least. Not at all that he was

over-anxious about the improvement of his class, or about the degree

of attention with which they listened to him, or the success which

might eventually crown his labours. Such little matters of detail

never troubled him much. His teaching was as the German philosophy

calls it, 'subjective'; it was to benefit himself, not others. He was

a learned egotist. He was a well of science, and the pulleys worked

uneasily when you wanted to draw anything out of it. In a word, he

was a learned miser.



Germany has not a few professors of this sort.



To his misfortune, my uncle was not gifted with a sufficiently rapid

utterance; not, to be sure, when he was talking at home, but

certainly in his public delivery; this is a want much to be deplored

in a speaker. The fact is, that during the course of his lectures at

the Johannaeum, the Professor often came to a complete standstill; he

fought with wilful words that refused to pass his struggling lips,

such words as resist and distend the cheeks, and at last break out

into the unasked-for shape of a round and most unscientific oath:

then his fury would gradually abate.



Now in mineralogy there are many half-Greek and half-Latin terms,

very hard to articulate, and which would be most trying to a poet's

measures. I don't wish to say a word against so respectable a

science, far be that from me. True, in the august presence of

rhombohedral crystals, retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites, Fassaites,

molybdenites, tungstates of manganese, and titanite of zirconium,

why, the most facile of tongues may make a slip now and then.



It therefore happened that this venial fault of my uncle's came to be

pretty well understood in time, and an unfair advantage was taken of

it; the students laid wait for him in dangerous places, and when he

began to stumble, loud was the laughter, which is not in good taste,

not even in Germans. And if there was always a full audience to

honour the Liedenbrock courses, I should be sorry to conjecture how

many came to make merry at my uncle's expense.



Nevertheless my good uncle was a man of deep learning--a fact I am

most anxious to assert and reassert. Sometimes he might irretrievably

injure a specimen by his too great ardour in handling it; but still

he united the genius of a true geologist with the keen eye of the

mineralogist. Armed with his hammer, his steel pointer, his magnetic

needles, his blowpipe, and his bottle of nitric acid, he was a

powerful man of science. He would refer any mineral to its proper

place among the six hundred [l] elementary substances now enumerated,

by its fracture, its appearance, its hardness, its fusibility, its

sonorousness, its smell, and its taste.



The name of Liedenbrock was honourably mentioned in colleges and

learned societies. Humphry Davy, [2] Humboldt, Captain Sir John

Franklin, General Sabine, never failed to call upon him on their way

through Hamburg. Becquerel, Ebelman, Brewster, Dumas, Milne-Edwards,

Saint-Claire-Deville frequently consulted him upon the most difficult

problems in chemistry, a science which was indebted to him for

considerable discoveries, for in 1853 there had appeared at Leipzig

an imposing folio by Otto Liedenbrock, entitled, "A Treatise upon

Transcendental Chemistry," with plates; a work, however, which failed

to cover its expenses.



To all these titles to honour let me add that my uncle was the

curator of the museum of mineralogy formed by M. Struve, the Russian

ambassador; a most valuable collection, the fame of which is European.



Such was the gentleman who addressed me in that impetuous manner.

Fancy a tall, spare man, of an iron constitution, and with a fair

complexion which took off a good ten years from the fifty he must own

to. His restless eyes were in incessant motion behind his full-sized

spectacles. His long, thin nose was like a knife blade. Boys have

been heard to remark that that organ was magnetised and attracted

iron filings. But this was merely a mischievous report; it had no

attraction except for snuff, which it seemed to draw to itself in

great quantities.



When I have added, to complete my portrait, that my uncle walked by

mathematical strides of a yard and a half, and that in walking he

kept his fists firmly closed, a sure sign of an irritable

temperament, I think I shall have said enough to disenchant any one

who should by mistake have coveted much of his company.



He lived in his own little house in Konigstrasse, a structure half

brick and half wood, with a gable cut into steps; it looked upon one

of those winding canals which intersect each other in the middle of

the ancient quarter of Hamburg, and which the great fire of 1842 had

fortunately spared.



[1] Sixty-three. (Tr.)



[2] As Sir Humphry Davy died in 1829, the translator must be pardoned

for pointing out here an anachronism, unless we are to assume that

the learned Professor's celebrity dawned in his earliest years. (Tr.)



It is true that the old house stood slightly off the perpendicular,

and bulged out a little towards the street; its roof sloped a little

to one side, like the cap over the left ear of a Tugendbund student;

its lines wanted accuracy; but after all, it stood firm, thanks to an

old elm which buttressed it in front, and which often in spring sent

its young sprays through the window panes.



My uncle was tolerably well off for a German professor. The house was

his own, and everything in it. The living contents were his

god-daughter Grauben, a young Virlandaise of seventeen, Martha, and

myself. As his nephew and an orphan, I became his laboratory

assistant.



I freely confess that I was exceedingly fond of geology and all its

kindred sciences; the blood of a mineralogist was in my veins, and in

the midst of my specimens I was always happy.



In a word, a man might live happily enough in the little old house in

the Konigstrasse, in spite of the restless impatience of its master,

for although he was a little too excitable--he was very fond of me.

But the man had no notion how to wait; nature herself was too slow

for him. In April, after a had planted in the terra-cotta pots

outside his window seedling plants of mignonette and convolvulus, he

would go and give them a little pull by their leaves to make them

grow faster. In dealing with such a strange individual there was

nothing for it but prompt obedience. I therefore rushed after him.