The Hollow Earth, and the Seven Man-Bearing Globes

M.L. Sherman & Wm. F. Lyon · Down to Earth Series · 15 pages

From The Theosophist of July 1884, pages 251–54, reviewing The Hollow Globe; or the World's Agitator and Reconciler. A Treatise on the Physical Conformation of the Earth, presented through the organism of M.L. Sherman, M.D., and written by Prof. Wm. F. Lyon, Chicago: Religio-Philosophical Publishing House, 1871. The running head states the position the review measures the book against: that our earth is one of seven man-bearing globes, regulated by the spirit of the moon.

The review sets aside the question of the book's supposed origin as a spirit communication — remarking in passing that the spirit may have been an adept — and states its central idea plainly: that this globe is a hollow sphere with a shell some thirty to forty miles thick, whose interior surface is a beautiful world in a more highly developed condition than the exterior, reached by a circuitous and spirally formed aperture in the unexplored open Polar Sea, through a channel broad and deep enough for the largest ships to steam either way as easily as through any other winding channel. It then examines how the author argues for a place he has not seen. Since his details rest on clairvoyant examination and no polar expedition had yet reached the pole — though some came very near, and there was apparently nothing to prevent them unless it were the exercise of some occult power — he cannot prove the claim positively, and instead proceeds negatively, by arguing that the globe cannot be otherwise. The review follows that negative argument through his first step, that every noted event in history has occurred in its proper order, time and place, in exact accordance with the condition of man at the period, so that gunpowder, steamships and the rest could neither have come sooner nor been longer delayed.

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