Project Gutenberg's Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880, by Various

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880
of Popular Literature and Science

Author: Various

Release Date: March 16, 2008 [EBook #24851]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

AUGUST, 1880.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J.B.
LIPPINCOTT & CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.

Transcriber's note:

Variant spellings and unusual punctuation have been retained.

AMERICAN AERONAUTS.

[Illustration: BALLOON ENTANGLED IN A TREE.]

Scattered here and there in this matter-of-fact, utilitarian age of
Business one finds instances of that love of daring for its own sake,
with an insatiable longing for new scenes and novel sensations, which in
the days of chivalry moved the mass of men to put saddle to horse and
ride off Somewhere seeking Something--just as occasional trilobites,
lonely and misshapen, are found in ages subsequent to the Silurian. Of
such stuff are our Arctic and African explorers made; the men who run
the lightning-expresses have a touch of it; it crops out in
steeple-climbers, cave-explorers, beast-tamers; it makes men assault
cloud-piercing and ice-mantled mountain-peaks and launch their frail
canoes for voyages down earth-riving canons and across continent
sundering oceans. Sometimes action is denied, and then it strikes in and
makes poets--perhaps the most daring adventurers of all. It must be
difficult for the beaters of iron and the barterers in swine to
understand why such useless timber is allowed to cumber the great
workhouse; but then we don't know _exactly_ what the trilobites were
good for, and the utilitarians may find comfort in the reflection that
at the present rate the obnoxious family is likely to entirely disappear
with the Palaeozoic.

Aeronauts have been free and accepted members