is to
Greek mythology that one must turn for the best form of any legend which
foreshadows history. Yet the prevalence of legends regarding flight,
existing in the records of practically every race, shows that this form
of transit was a dream of many peoples--man always wanted to fly, and
imagined means of flight.

In this age of steel, a very great part of the inventive genius of man
has gone into devices intended to facilitate transport, both of men and
goods, and the growth of civilisation is in reality the facilitation of
transit, improvement of the means of communication. He was a genius who
first hoisted a sail on a boat and saved the labour of rowing; equally,
he who first harnessed ox or dog or horse to a wheeled vehicle was a
genius--and these looked up, as men have looked up from the earliest
days of all, seeing that the birds had solved the problem of transit far
more completely than themselves. So it must have appeared, and there
is no age in history in which some dreamers have not dreamed of the
conquest of the air; if the caveman had left records, these would
without doubt have showed that he, too, dreamed this dream. His main
aim, probably, was self-preservation; when the dinosaur looked round the
corner, the prehistoric bird got out of the way in his usual manner,
and prehistoric man, such of him as succeeded in getting out of the way
after his fashion--naturally envied the bird, and concluded that as lord
of creation in a doubtful sort of way he ought to have equal
facilities. He may have tried, like Simon the Magician, and other early
experimenters, to improvise those facilities; assuming that he did,
there is the groundwork of much of the older legend with regard to men
who flew, since, when history began, legends would be fashioned out
of attempts and even the desire to fly, these being compounded of some
small ingredient of truth and much exaggeration and addition.

In a study of the first beginnings of the art, it is worth while to
mention even the earliest of the legends and traditions, for they show
the trend of men's minds and the constancy of this dream that has become
reality in the twentieth century. In one of the oldest records of the
world, the Indian classic Mahabarata, it is stated that 'Krishna's
enemies sought the aid of the demons, who built an aerial chariot with
sides of iron and clad with wings. The chariot was driven through the
sky till it stood over Dwarakha, where Krishna's fo