guide-rope, which is dropped from a balloon to allow her
to be secured by a landing party, or is trailed on the ground to reduce
her speed and to assist in maintaining a steady height.

The dangers of the balloon were diminished by the labours of scientific
men, but its disabilities remained. No one who travelled in a balloon
could choose his destination. The view of the earth, and of the clouds,
obtainable from a height, was beautiful and unfamiliar, but in the
absence of any specific utility the thing became a popular toy. In
public gardens a balloon could be counted on to attract a crowd, and the
showman soon gave it its place, as a miracle of nature, by the side of
the giant and the dwarf, the living skeleton, and the fat woman. A horse
is not seen to advantage in the car of a balloon, but it is a marvel
that a horse should be seen there at all, and equestrian ascents became
one of the attractions of the Cremorne Gardens in 1821.

It was not until 1859 that an organized attempt was made to reclaim the
balloon for the purposes of science. In that year a committee, appointed
by the British Association to make observations on the higher strata of
the atmosphere, met at Wolverhampton. Volunteers were lacking until, in
1862, James Glaisher, one of the members of the committee, declared his
willingness to prepare the apparatus and to make the observations from a
balloon. Glaisher had spent many years on meteorological observation, in
Ireland, at Cambridge University, and at the Royal Observatory,
Greenwich. He proposed to investigate the effect of different elevations
on the temperature of the dew-point; on the composition and electrical
condition of the atmosphere, and on the rate and direction of the wind
currents in it; on the earth's magnetism, and the solar spectrum; on
sound, and on solar radiation. From 1862 to 1866 he made twenty-eight
ascents, with Henry Coxwell as his balloonist. The most famous of these
was from Wolverhampton on the 5th of September 1862, when Glaisher
claimed to have reached a height of fully seven miles. After recording a
height of 29,000 feet Glaisher swooned; Coxwell lost the use of his
limbs, but succeeded in pulling the cord of the valve with his teeth.
When Glaisher swooned the balloon was ascending rapidly; when he came
to, thirteen minutes later, it was descending rapidly, and the height
that he claimed was an inference, supported by the reading of a minimum
thermometer. Critics have p