here to state that the great discovery that
stirred the spirits of men from the one end of Europe to the other,
and gave rise to hopes of such vast discoveries, should have failed
in realising the expectations which seemed so clearly justified by the
first experiments? It is now eighty-six years since the first aerial
journey astonished the world, and yet, in 1870, we are but little
more advanced in the science than we were in 1783. 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." The accomplishment of raising oneself in the air,
however, had no actual professors in antiquity, and the discovery
of Montgolfier seems to have come into the world, so to speak,
spontaneously. By this it is to be understood that, unlike Copernicus
and Columbus, Montgolfier could not read in history of any similar
discovery, containing the germ of his own feat. At least, we have no
proof that the ancient nations practiced the art of aerial navigation
to any extent whatever. Th