that of Phaeton downwards to Astolfo's,[3] were evidently
intended by their authors as mythical; not so, however, with Bishop
Wilkins;--he boldly avers, for several reasons which he keeps to
himself, and for others not very comprehensible to us, which he
details "seriously and on good grounds," "that it is possible to make
a flying chariot, in which a man may sit, and give such a motion unto
it, as shall convey him through the air; and this perhaps might be
made large enough to carry divers men at the same time, together with
food for their _viaticum_, and commodities for traffic." "It is
not," lucidly continues the Bishop, "the bigness of any thing in this
kind, that can hinder its motion, if the motive faculty be answerable
thereunto. We see a great ship swims as well as a small cork; and an
eagle flies in the air, as well as a little gnat. This engine may be
contrived from the same principles by which Archytas made a wooden
dove, and Regiomontanus a wooden eagle. I conceive it were no
difficult matter, (if a man had leisure,) to show more particularly
the means of composing it"!--which want of leisure in the credulous
Bishop, our readers will regret with us, especially those inventive
geniuses, who, like the projector in the reign of George I., published
a scheme for manufacturing pine plank from pine saw-dust, or the still
more ingenious undertaker of later times, who proposed to make _pine
plank_ out of _oak_ saw-dust, by the mere addition of a little
turpentine!

Again, Swift's flying Island of Laputa is a phenomenon so opposed to
all scientific probability, and so directly at variance with natural
laws, that it loses in interest in a direct ratio with the violence it
does to our feelings. Nor is the mode of conveyance imagined by
Voltaire less incongruous than that of Swift. When Micromegas, ah
inhabitant of Sirius, whose adventures were evidently suggested by
those of Gulliver, accompanied by an inhabitant of Saturn, leaves the
latter planet, they are, in the first place, made to leap upon the
Ring of Saturn, which they find tolerably flat, "comme l'a fort bien
devine un illustre habitant de notre petit globe:" thence they go from
moon to moon, and a comet passing close to one of these, they throw
themselves upon it, with their attendants and instruments. In their
course, they fall in with the satellites of Jupiter, and pass on to
Jupiter itself, where they remain for a year; but what becomes of the
comet in t