The Blockade Runners and Dr. Ox's Experiment In "The Blockade Runners" Verne again adopts a theme which is, at least nominally, American. In it he gives a very fair view of the British attitude toward our country during that tragic period of our suffering and trial. "Dr. Ox's Experiment" was one of those prophetic scientific fantasies which leaped so frequently into the inspired mind of Verne. The remarkably vivifying and invigorating effects of pure oxygen, even upon the dying, have now become an established part of medical science. In 1874, when "Doctor Ox" was published, the knowledge of...

A Floating City, published in 1871, enjoyed a popularity almost equal to that of Round the World in Eighty Days. The "Floating City" was the direct result of the trip which the author actually made to America in 1867, on the largest iron ship ever built. He gives us a faithful picture of the natural and usual incidents of an ocean voyage of those days, enlivening these by introducing a romance aboard ship. The pictures of the "Great Eastern," are of course exaggerated, not so much in words themselves as in the impressions they convey. But the pictures of New York and of Niagara are the...

This volume includes all of Verne's earlier stories as he himself thought worth preserving. These he gathered in later years, and had some of them reissued by his Paris publishers. "A Drama in the Air," was, as Verne himself tells us, his first published story. It appeared soon after 1850 in a little-known local magazine called the "Musee des Families." The tale, though somewhat amateurish, is very characteristic of the master's later style. In it we can see, as it were, the germ of all that was to follow, the interest in the new advances of science, the dramatic story, the carefully...

In this book Verne struck again the bolder note of imagination and creation. Here the daring explorers are represented as actually attaining the pole; and the bold inventions of what they saw and did, rising to the startling climax of the volcano and the madman's climb, are led up to through such a well-managed, well-constructed and convincing story, that many critics have selected this in its turn as the most powerful of Verne's works. It is notable that, with the exception of the open sea and the volcano, the world which our author here penetrates in imagination, coincides closely with that...

Measuring a Meridian is an African tale, first published in 1874 under the cumbrous title The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa. The story was afterward revised and reissued under its briefer title. It is a hunting story, perhaps Vern's very ablest effort in that line. It has aroused many a youthful sportsman's throbbing eagerness for the chase, has given him his first knowledge and his earliest enthusiasm for the heart-stirring excitement to be found in "hunting big game."

In 1878 appeared Dick Sands, the epic of the slave trade. This picture of the wilds of Africa, its adventures and its dangers, the savage hunting both of beasts and men, has always been a favorite among Verne's readers. It contains no marvels, no inventions, but merely, amid stirring scenes and actions seeks to convey two truthful impressions. One is the traveler's teaching the geographical information, the picture of Africa as explorers, botanists, and zoologists have found it. The other is the moral lesson of the awful curse of slavery, its brutalizing, horrible influence upon all who come...

The Survivors of the Chancellor was issued in 1875. Shipwrecks occur in other of Verne's tales, but this is his only story devoted wholly to such a disaster. In it the author has gathered all the tragedy, the mystery, and the suffering possible to the sea. All the various forms of disaster, all the possibilities of horror, the depths of shame and agony, are heaped upon these unhappy voyagers. The accumulation is mathematically complete and emotionally unforgettable. The tale has well been called the "imperishable epic of shipwreck."

A Tour of the Moon was originally published in 1865 as the sequel to Verne's better known A Trip from the Earth to the Moon. As to the discoveries made by the explorers, it is noteworthy that here Verne has again restrained himself, instead of plunging blindly into inventions as a less conscientious romancer might easily have done. His picture of the moon is hard and cold, confined to just what astronomers actually know or closely surmise. He brings the views and visions of the scientist into a field usually abandoned to the fooleries of extravaganza.