You are a Columbus of Science who has discovered a Lost World : lo scienziato-esploratore in The Lost World di Arthur Conan Doyle

In The Lost World (1912) Arthur Conan Doyle creates the eccentric Professor Challenger, a late Victorian Darwinian scientist, who explores a ‘lost world’ on an isolated plateau of the Amazonian forest, peopled by astonishing creatures belonging to the prehistoric past. As a zoologist and anthropologist, Challenger is determined to find evidence to the origins of humankind, but he is also interested in the exploration of the unknown areas of Brazil the British wanted to acquire. Adventure story and science fiction are employed by Conan Doyle as a vehicle in order to develop expansionist colonial fantasies. Conan Doyle’s work is projected onto a specific geographical area – South America – and, at the same time, provides his readers with a highly imaginative and anachronistic setting. At the centre of The Lost World, Challenger’s adventures show that at the beginning of the XX century Darwin’s theories and ideas permeated British culture, generating a deep sense of anxiety. In this sense, Professor Challenger is a remarkable figure conveying how late Victorian culture conceived and represented the role of the explorer-as-scientist in the context of a popularized vision of the empire