Man's Quest for Adventure and Exploration

The basic theme of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is mankind's universal impulse to understand and explore every environment. Aronnax, like Adam and Eve in the Bible, takes on the task of identifying and classifying every animal on the planet. Captain Nemo takes his strange submarine into places no man has ever been before: a coral cemetery, a grotto filled with pearls, a sea made of milk and so forth. He travels tens of thousands of miles under and on the surface of the sea because he has a quest for adventure and knowledge. This quest for knowledge and understanding and the need to explore every inch of the planet seems to be a function inherent to the human brain. The author Jules Verne totally understands and delights in this universal and basic impulse to acquire new knowledge.

Science is a corollary of man's...