f another, more cognate to our present
topic, entitled "Three Hundred Years Hence," now out of print, though
published only three years ago. In this latter work he has a chapter on
"Our Conquest of the Air," and imagines a lighter gas called by him
"lucegene," as also a bird-like human flight very much as I had
conceived it forty-one years ago. He tells me also that the best vehicle
for flying might be an imitation of the sidelong action of a flat fish
in water; but how far he has worked upon this idea I know not. Possibly,
if in the room, he may tell us after I release you.

It is most worthy of notice, that in the almost solitary Biblical
instance of winged angels (see Isaiah vi. 2, and a corresponding passage
in Ezekiel--all other angelic ministers being represented as
etherealised men) these are somewhat like birds in outline, though
having more wings,--with twain covering the head so as to cleave the
air, with twain to cover the feet so as to be a sort of tail or rudder,
while with twain they did fly: even as Blake, and Raffaelle, and some
other painters have depicted them. I mentioned this once to Professor
Owen, our great natural philosopher, in a talk I had with him on human
flight, and he thought such seraphim very remarkable in the light of
analogous comparative anatomy.

Ovid also in a passage before me advocates our imitation of birds if we
would fly bodily: in his "De Icari Casu," he says (with omissions)--

"Naturamque novat: nam ponit in ordine pennas
A minima coeptas, longam breviore sequenti: ...
Sic imitentur aves: geminas libravit in alas
Ipse suum corpus, motaque pependit in aura."

Which, being interpreted, means this,--

"Nature he reproduces, ranging fine
From least to longest feathery plumes aline,
Thus imitating birds, that on the air
With balanced wings are poised in lightness there."

Whilst our noble Laureate in "Locksley Hall" goes in for aerial
machines, "Argosies of magic sails," and "airy navies grappling in the
central blue."

As to that essay of mine published in the first number of Ainsworth's
Magazine, August 1842, long before the Patent Aerial Company started
their projects, and very much noticed at the time,--Mr. Claude Hamilton
ingrafted it in his work on Flying; the Duke of Argyll in a note before
me commends this principle of copying nature as the true one; a Signor
Ignazio of Milan in 1877 adopted almost exactly my Flying Man,--which
was