out later to be false or greatly exaggerated, so that Hawthorne's use of science sometimes appears from our vantage point to partake of the completely unreal and unrealistic. "The Man of Adamant," a story about a man who turns to stone, for example, was based on material Hawthorne presented in a non fiction piece about a newly developed method of preserving the dead by turning animal tissue into stone. Through grounding many of his fictionalizations in accepted science, Hawthorne maintained contact with the plausible even when the events he presented transcended the physical. Numerous experts demonstrate their technical abilities throughout Hawthorne's fiction without deviating greatly from what was in Hawthorne's time taken as scientific fact (Franklin 7).
Although it in some respects demonstrates some extraordinary prescience, Hawthorne's science fiction goes beyond the characteristic so often attributed to the works of Jules Verne, the more or less accurate prediction of things to come. Although Hawthorne in some instances anticipated develop
...