he bestrides the horse and employs the dog to
capture the hare, the deer, and the ostrich.
With no covering of his own to keep away cold
and to shield his skin from wounds at each
rougher contact, he is forced to spin, to weave,
to fabricate armour, besides appropriating the
natural clothing of better-clad animals. An
eminently featherless and wingless biped, all
analogy leads us to believe him fated to traverse
the regions of Air. Already mounted on his
locomotive, he leaves the race-horse far behind;
and there is every possibility that he may one
day rival the soarings of the condor, the flights
of the ringdove, and the migrations of the swallow
and the crane.

From the time of the Montgolfiers to the
present day, this was hoped to be effected by
means of balloons. Ingenuity has been exhausted
in contriving methods of guiding balloons, by
rudders, sails, aërial oars, and wheels. Aërial
locomotion was attempted to be conducted as if
a balloon were a ship. So far from being a
ship, however, a balloon is not even a buoy
let loose from its moorings; for a buoy floats
on the surface of the sea; whereas, our aërial
sea has no surface. If it had one, we could
never reach it; and if we reached it, we could
not live on it. A balloon is a jelly-fish
immersed in a fluid, by whose every current it
is helplessly carried to and fro. The jelly-fish
makes feeble efforts to direct its own course,
with about as much success as those of a balloon.
For eighty long years, it has been the balloons
themselves which have rendered the direction
of balloons impossible. To contend with air,
so long as you are lighter than air, is folly and
absurdity. Whether you make the form of your
balloon conical, spherical, cylindrical, or fish-
shaped — whether you enclose your ascensional
power in one or many envelopes — the negative
result is ever the same. Can we even imagine
a balloon making way against a high wind?

A ship is a vessel floating on the surface of
one fluid, the sea, than which it is altogether
specifically lighter, and shaping its course
through the impulse of forces, the winds, which
exist in another fluid, the air, in which it is also
partly immersed. Half of it is in one fluid, and
half of it in another. If we substitute, to impel
the vessel, the force of oars or of steam for that
of the wind, the ship must still remain at the
surface of contact of sea and air, in order that
she may be supported by the heavier, and that
her crew may breathe the lighter fluid.

It is clear, therefore, that, to traverse the air
with the power of directing our own course, we
must imitate, not the drifting of the jelly-fish nor
the thistle-down, but the flight of birds in air,
and of bladderless fishes in water. We must press
on the medium in which we move, with violent
mechanical (since we have not sufficient
muscular) force. To mount in the air, and exercise
self-direction in it, we must be specifically
heavier than air. To master the air, instead of
being its plaything, we must find a support in
it, instead of serving it as a cushion. The bird,
which is specifically heavier than air, contrives
to be supported by it: man must contrive to
do the same.

We may ascend in the air by the help of a
screw. There is a toy for children, something
like the sails of a mill set in rapid rotation by
pulling a string, which performs the feat. Mill
sails are not "sails," but portions of a screw.
The screw of a steamer is a mill-sail working in
water, only it acts upon the water instead of
being acted on by the wind. By applying the
same principle we may mount in the air. The
screw will bore into the air as a gimlet bores
into wood; the one will drag after it its motive
power, exactly as the other drags its handle
after it. With the screw as the mechanism and
steam as its mover, the problem enters the
domain of technology, which is the glory of the
present epoch. People are quite at liberty to
make big eyes and shrug their shoulders. It is
some encouragement to remember how once we
were told that the iron wheel of a locomotive
on an iron rail would slip round and round
without advancing; that if the locomotive did
advance, the first cow it met on the railroad
would stop it; and that if it did upset the
obstructive cow, it would run on so quickly as to
kill the passengers by stopping their breath.

Once up, broad wings will enable us to sweep
and to glide like a kite or an eagle. Progressive
motion may be effected by copying the
undulating flight of the wagtail and the woodpecker:
only instead of measuring our inclined planes by
yards deep, we may reckon on making them by
furlongs.

BLOTTED OUT.

THOUGH it was not a pity which showed itself
in any active form of sympathy, the neighbourhood
did sincerely feel for the two ladies left so
entirely alone in the world. They had plenty of
money, certainly; a good house and a pretty
garden; and as the legacy of poverty aggravates
even the loss of a father (which in this case,
however, was rather a relief than a loss), one
might imagine a worse fate than that of Martha
and Hester Todyeare, pitiable as theirs was;
for, save this one exception of money, there
was not a social circumstance in their lives
which the poorest need envy.

Their father, William Todyeare, a passionate,
self-willed man, had married a woman of a
station much inferior to his own. He had married
her because he had been obliged to take her on
her own conditions; but he revenged himself
for the force put upon him in the ordering of
their relations by not acknowledging her as his
wife, and letting her appear only as his
housekeeper— and the mother of his two daughters.
She was not a woman of the Griselda class,
and could never bring herself to endure her
wrongs in silence, but told the world, whenever
it came in her way, the story of her sufferings
and the fact of her marriage, leaving it to
form its own conclusions. And the conclusion
to which it came, almost unanimously, was to