him very much the same
being as it finds him, with the same habits, the same prejudices, and
only slightly enhanced powers. The greatest and most significant
advances were prehistoric. What invention, of which any record remains,
can compare in importance with the invention of speech; and what day in
the world's history is more worthy of celebration than that day, the
birthday of thought and truth, when a sound, uttered by the breath, from
being the expression of a feeling became the mark of a thing? The man
who first embarked on the sea has been praised for the triple armour of
his courage; but he must be content with praise; his biography will
never be written. The North American Indians are reckoned a primitive
people, but when first they come under the notice of history they bring
with them one of the most perfect of human inventions--the birch-bark
canoe. What centuries of dreams and struggles and rash adventures went
to the inventing and perfecting of that frail boat? What forgotten names
deserve honour for the invention of the paddle and the sail? The whole
story is beyond recovery in the rapidly closing backward perspective of
time. Man's eyes are set in his head so that he may go forward, and
while he is healthy and alert he does not trouble to look behind him. If
the beginnings of European civilization are rightly traced to certain
tribes of amphibious dwellers on the coast of the Mediterranean, who
reared the piles of their houses in the water, and so escaped the
greater perils of the land, then some sort of rudimentary navigation was
the first condition of human progress, and sea-power, which defies the
devastators of continents, had earlier prophets than Admiral Mahan. But
the memory of these thousands of years has passed like a watch in the
night.

The conquest of the sea can never be recorded in history; even the
conquest of the air, which was achieved within the lifetime of all but
the very youngest of those who are now alive, admits of no sure or
perfect record. The men who bore a part in it, and still survive, are
preoccupied with the future, and are most of them impatient of their own
past. Where knowledge begins, there begin also conflicting testimonies
and competing claims. It is no part of the business of this history of
the war in the air to compare these testimonies or to resolve these
claims. To narrate how man learned to fly would demand a whole treatise,
and the part of the history which ends