There are certain men, said my uncle, Professor Aronnax, whom Nature has endowed with a peculiar restlessness of the spirit. It is a fever of the mind that drives them from the warm hearth and the familiar street, propelling them towards the unknown, the inhospitable, and the mathematically improbable. I had always considered myself a man of the study, a classifier of data, until the day I met Dr. Théo Caspian.