llection of
machines at Venice, in 1617.

Another species of parachute, less perfect, to be sure; than that of
Garnerin, but still a practical machine, was described 189 years before
the great aeronaut's feat at Paris. We read in the narrative of the
ambassador of Louis XIV at Siam, at the end of the seventeenth century,
the following passage--"A mountebank at the court of the King of Siam
climbed to the top of a high bamboo-tree, and threw himself into the air
without any other support than two parasols. Thus equipped, he abandoned
himself to the winds, which carried him, as by chance, sometimes to
the earth, sometimes on trees or houses, and sometimes into the river,
without any harm happening to him."

Is not this the idea of our parachutes?

Chapter IV. First Public Trial of the Balloon.

(Montgolfier's Balloon Annonay, 5th of June of 1783.)

We are accustomed to rank the brothers Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier
as equally distinguished in the field of science. The reason for thus
associating these two names seems to have been the fraternal friendship
which subsisted in an extraordinary degree in the Montgolfier family,
rather than any equality of claim which they had to the notice of
posterity. After special investigation, we find that Joseph Montgolfier
was very superior to his brother, and that it is to him principally, if
not exclusively, that we owe the invention of aerostation. Nevertheless,
we shall not insist upon this fact; and seeing that a sacred amity
always cemented a perfect union in the Montgolfier family, we will
regard that union as unbroken in any sense, and will not insinuate that
the brother of Montgolfier was undeserving of the honoured rank which in
his lifetime he held.

In 1783, the sons of Pierre Montgolfier, a rich papermaker at Annonay
department of Ardeche, were already in the prime of life, and it is
related of them that their principal occupation was experimenting in the
physical sciences. Joseph Montgolfier, after being convinced by a number
of minor experiments made in 1782 and 1783, that a heat of 180 degrees
rarefied the air and made it occupy a space of TWICE the extent it
occupied before being heated--or, in other words, that this degree of
heat diminished the weight of air by one half--began to speculate on
what might be the shape and the material of a structure which being
filled with air thus heated, would be able to raise itself from the
earth in spite of the weight