effort, the labour, the sweat, and the care,
the slavish life by which we purchase this
dominion, he will have but one word to say:
"King myself by birth over space and light,
why should I abdicate, whilst man, in his
loftiest ambition, in his supreme desire after
happiness and liberty, dreams that he is a
bird and is furnished with wings?"

When, at the close of the last century, man
conceived the bold idea of confiding himself
to the winds, of mounting in the air, without
oar or rudder, or any means of directing his
course, he proclaimed that he had found
wings at last, had eluded the prohibition of
nature, and had conquered gravity. Cruel
and tragic accidents gave the lie to this
ambitious boast. Then, the wing of the bird
was studied; attempts were made to imitate
it; the inimitable mechanism was coarsely
counterfeited. We had the frightful spectacle
of a poor human bird, encumbered with long
unwieldy wings, throwing himself from a
column a hundred feet high, fluttering for a
moment, and then dashed to pieces. The sad
and deadly machine, with all its laborious
complexity, was very far from representing
that admirable arm (greatly superior to the
human arm), that system of muscles which
co-operate together to produce so powerful
and so rapid a movement. The human wing,
lax and drooping, was specially wanting in
the all-powerful muscle which unites the
shoulder to the chest (the humerus to the
sternum) and gives its violent impulse to the
flashing flight of the falcon. The instrument
here is so close to the motor, the oar to the
rower, and is so completely one with it, that
by this arrangement the frigate-bird is able
to row at the rate of eighty leagues per hour,
five or six times quicker than railway speed,
distancing the hurricane, and without rival
except the lightning.

But even if our poor imitators could really
have imitated the wing, they would have been
none the forwarder. They copied the form,
but not the internal structure; they believed
that the bird's ascending power lay in its
flight alone, not being aware of the auxiliary
secret which nature conceals in its plumage
and its bones. The mystery and the marvel
is the faculty which it possesses of making
itself light or heavy at will, by admitting
more or less air into these express reservoirs.
To become light it inflates its volume,
diminishing thereby its relative weight; from
that moment, it rises spontaneously in any
medium heavier than itself. To descend, or
fall, it shrinks and makes itself small by
discharging the air which swelled its size, and
is thereby heavier, as heavy as it chooses.
Here was where the mistake lay; it was
ignorance of this point which caused the fatal
results. They knew that a bird floating on
the water is a vessel, a ship; they did not
know that diving in water or hovering in air
it is a balloon. They imitated the wing alone;
but, with the whig well imitated, if the
internal force is not superadded, death is
only a more certain result.

But this faculty, this rapid play of mechanism
for taking in and discharging air, for
swimming with a ballast variable at will,—
on what does it depend? On a unique, an
unheard-of power of respiration. A man
who should receive as much air at once,
would be stifled at the outset. The lung of
bird, elastic and powerful, absorbs and
imbibes it with exhilarated delight, and floods
with it the air-cells of the very bones. Every
successive second brings aspiration and
renovation as quick as lightning. The blood,
ceaselessly vivified with fresh air, imparts to
every muscle that inexhaustible vigour which
is enjoyed by no other created beings, and
which belongs only to the elements. Herein
is the prodigy, and not in the mere wing.
Were you gifted with the wing of the condor,
and could follow him when, from the summit
of the Andes and their Siberian glaciers he
flashes down, he falls upon the burning shores
of Peru, traversing in one minute all the
temperatures, all the climates of the globe,
breathing at one breath the fearful mass of
air frozen or baked, no matter to him—you
would reach the ground, although unhurt in
limb and without a scratch, smitten by
apoplexy as if by a thunderbolt. The smallest
bird puts the strongest quadruped to shame.
Human tradition is fixed on this point. Man
wills to be, not man, but an angel, a winged
spirit. The winged genii of the Persians
became the cherubim of Judaea. Greece
gave wings to her Psyche, the soul. The
soul still retains her wings! she has dashed
through the gloom of the middle ages, and
mounts with increasing aspiration. "O,
that I were a bird!" exclaims man. No
woman doubts that her infant will become an
angel.

The wing attains its final triumph in a
most wonderful inhabitant of the atmosphere.
After a storm at sea, in distant climes, you
may observe, in a patch of royally-blue sky,
a small bird with immense wings, hovering
at an altitude of ten thousand feet. Is it
a gull? No; its wings are black. Is it an
eagle? No; the bird itself is small. It is
the little eagle of the seas, the first of the
winged race, the audacious navigator who
never furls sail, the prince of the tempest,
the despiser of all danger; the warrior, or
the frigate-bird. We have at last reached
the limit of the series of which the wingless
bird was the starting-point. Here is a bird
that is nothing but wing. No body at all,
or hardly any; scarcely as big as that of a
barn-door fowl, with prodigious wings,
sometimes fourteen feet from tip to tip. Such a
bird as this, sustained by nature on such
supports, has nothing to do but to float at ease.
Does the tempest rage? He mounts to a
height in which he finds serenity. The
poetic metaphor, false when applied to any
other bird, is no figure of speech for him; he