Our age is the most renowned for its discoveries of any
that the world has seen. Man is borne over the surface of the
earth by steam; he is as familiar as the fish with the liquid
element; he transmits his words instantaneously from London to
New York; he draws pictures without pencil or brush, and has made
the sun his slave. The air alone remains to him unsubdued. The
proper management of balloons has not yet been discovered. More
than that, it appears that balloons are unmanageable, and it is
to air-vessels, constructed more nearly upon the model of birds,
that we must go to find out the secret of aerial navigation. At
present, as in former times, we are at the mercy of
balloons--globes lighter than the air, and therefore the sport
and the prey of tempests and currents. And aeronauts, instead of
showing themselves now as the benefactors of mankind, exhibit
themselves mainly to gratify a frivolous curiosity, or to crown
with eclat a public fete.
Chapter II. Attempts in Ancient Times to Fly in the Air.
Before contemplating the sudden conquest of the aerial kingdom,
as accomplished and proclaimed at the end of the last century, it
is at once curious and instructive to cast a glance backward, and
to examine, by the glimmering of ancient traditions, the attempts
which have been made or imagined by man to enfranchise himself
from the attraction of the earth
The greater number of the arts and sciences can be traced along a
chronological ladder of great length: some, indeed, lose
themselves in the night of time.
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