ied area, precisely
as a ship sinks a little in fresh water. Hence the phenomena of "jolt"
and your "inexplicable collisions" with factory chimneys. In air, as on
earth, it is safest to fly high.

EMERGENCY--There is only one rule of the road in air, earth, and water.
Do you want the firmament to yourself?

PICCIOLA--Both Poles have been overdone in Art and Literature. Leave
them to Science for the next twenty years. You did not send a stamp with
your verses.

NORTH NIGERIA--The Mark Boat was within her right in warning you up on
the Reserve. The shadow of a low-flying dirigible scares the game. You
can buy all the photos you need at Sokoto.

NEW ERA--It is not etiquette to overcross an A. B. C. official's boat
without asking permission. He is one of the body responsible for the
planet's traffic, and for that reason must not be interfered with. You,
presumably, are out on your own business or pleasure, and should leave
him alone. For humanity's sake don't try to be "democratic."

REVIEWS

Reviews

The Life of Xavier Lavalle

(_Reviewed by Rene Talland. Ecole Aeronautique, Paris_)

Ten years ago Lavalle, "that imperturbable dreamer of the heavens," as
Lazareff hailed him, gathered together the fruits of a lifetime's
labour, and gave it, with well-justified contempt, to a world bound hand
and foot to Barald's Theory of Vertices and "compensating electric
nodes." "They shall see," he wrote--in that immortal postscript to "The
Heart of the Cyclone"--"the Laws whose existence they derided written in
fire _beneath_ them."

"But even here," he continues, "there is no finality. Better a thousand
times my conclusions should be discredited than that my dead name should
lie across the threshold of the temple of Science--a bar to further
inquiry."

So died Lavalle--a prince of the Powers of the Air, and even at his
funeral Cellier jested at "him who had gone to discover the secrets of
the Aurora Borealis."

If I choose thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that Cellier's
theories are to-day as exploded as the ludicrous deductions of the
Spanish school. In the place of their fugitive and warring dreams we
have, definitely, Lavalle's Law of the Cyclone which he surprised in
darkness and cold at the foot of the overarching throne of the Aurora
Borealis. It is there that I, intent on my own investigations, have
passed and re-passed a hundred times the worn leonine face, white as the
snow beneath him,