"Having assembled a crew of adventurers, the brilliant, blustering physiologist and physicist Professor Challenger journeys to a South American jungle ... in search of a lost plateau crawling with iguanodons. It's a ripping yarn-the first popular dinosaurs-still-live tale, prototype for everything from King Kong to Jurassic Park. At the same time, however, it's a philosophical novel, one that animates-in a thrilling, humorous fashion-the author's obsessive drive (also seen in his Sherlock Holmes stories) to reconcile the claims of logical reason and intuition. In their second adventure, Challenger et al. discover that the planet is about to pass through a belt of poisonous ether which will destroy all life on Earth. However, Challenger has transformed his wife's dressing room into an airtight chamber, so they can witness the end of the world. An epistemological thriller"--