by Jules Verne

Article from "The Examiner", San Francisco, May 25, 1901

    Amiens (France), May 24--I am seventy-three years old, yet I would gladly accept Mr. W. R. Hearst's invitation to race around the world if I were ten years younger. I am grateful for and flattered by the invitation. Tell the proprietor of "The Examiner" that I admire his great enterprise--especially in these matters upon which the solution of scientific questions depend.

    I have had influenza all winter and an operation for a cataract was recently performed upon my eye, which leaves me half blind. Besides, my hearing is impaired. Under these circumstances I could not do justice to "The Examiner." The man whose health compels him to go to bed at 8 o'clock would never do for a globe-trotter.

    My book "Around the World in Eighty Days" is pure fantasy. The journey should now be made in thirty-three days. When my book was published thirty years ago, I calculated seven days for crossing the American continent. I believe you can now go from the "Journal" in New York to "The Examiner" in San Francisco in four and a half days.

    The boy travelers of the "Examiner-Journal-American" will more than double what was once considered the heroic feat of Phineas Fogg. The hero of my romance--my imaginary traveler--had no trans-Siberian railway. I compliment by anticipation "The Examiner" upon cutting down my hero's record. I will begin tomorrow my ninety-ninth volume and I will publish next month a book which will give the enterprising "Examiner" another opportunity for solving another great anthropological question.

    I believe there is another race of beings, neither man nor monkey, but holding an intermediate place between the most perfect ape and the lowest type of man. This being Darwin would call the "missing link" between the anthropoid ape and man. I do not, for I refuse to accept the Darwinian theory of man's development by natural selection. An abyss separates my being from all other animals which cannot be crossed by the development theory.

    This intermediate race of beings will be found in some great forest of Africa, South Africa or Siberia. I call my book "La Grande Foret." I describe a town in one of these immense forests inhabited by such beings and which have a family life such as does not exist in the highest circles of the most developed anthropoid ape. It is a work of imagination, but with a geographical and anthropomorphic basis.

    My book "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" was a work of imagination. "Around the World in Eighty Days" was a work of imagination. Claudius Bombarnac foresaw the trans-Siberian railway. This railway and the submarine boat are now accomplished facts. Some enterprising journal may now send out travelers to discover my new race of beings.