tmosphere the medium of transit, would, in the
early stages of society, hardly strike the mind at all, or, if it did,
it would only strike it as a physical impossibility. Nature has not
supplied man with wings, as it has done the fowls of heaven, and to find
a locomotive means of transportation through the air was in the infancy
of all science absolutely hopeless. But advantage would be early taken
of the buoyant property of water, particularly of the sea, which must
have been known to mankind from the creation. The canoe and the raft
would be first constructed, and, in the course of time, experience would
teach men to build vessels of a larger size, to fix the rudder to the
stern, to erect the mast, and unfurl the sails. Thus would the art of
navigating the ocean advance from step to step, while the art navigating
the air remained a mystery, practiced, it may be, by flying demons, and
flying witches, and the like ethereal beings of a dark mythology, but an
achievement to which ordinary mortals could make no pretensions.

Our object in this paper is to give a concise history of aeronautics,
commencing at that period when something like an approach was made to
the principles upon which the art could be reduced to practice.

The person who is entitled to the honor of the discovery of the main
principle of aeronautics--atmospheric buoyancy--is Roger Bacon, an
English monk of the thirteenth century. This eminent man, whose uncommon
genius was, in that superstitious and ignorant age, ascribed to his
intercourse with the devil, was aware that the air is a material of some
consistency, capable, like the ocean, of bearing vessels on its surface;
and, in one of his works, he particularly describes the construction of
a machine by which he believed it was possible to navigate the air. It
is a large, thin, hollow globe of copper, or other suitable metal, which
he proposes to fill with "ethereal air or liquid fire," and then to
launch from some elevated point into the atmosphere, when he supposes it
will float on its surface, like a vessel on the water. He afterward
says, "There may be made some flying instrument, so that a man, sitting
in the middle of the instrument, and turning some mechanism, may put in
motion some artificial wings, which may beat the air like a flying
bird." But, though Bacon knew the buoyancy of the atmosphere, he was
very imperfectly acquainted with its properties. His idea seems to have
been, that the bound