eir like told of mechanical birds
that flew and sang and even laid eggs. More credible is the story
of Aulus Gellius, who in his Attic Nights tells how Archytas, four
centuries prior to the opening of the Christian era, made a wooden
pigeon that actually flew by means of a mechanism of balancing weights
and the breath of a mysterious spirit hidden within it. There may yet
arise one credulous enough to state that the mysterious spirit was
precursor of the internal combustion engine, but, however that may be,
the pigeon of Archytas almost certainly existed, and perhaps it actually
glided or flew for short distances--or else Aulus Gellius was an utter
liar, like Cassiodorus and his fellows. In far later times a certain
John Muller, better known as Regiomontanus, is stated to have made an
artificial eagle which accompanied Charles V. on his entry to and exit
from Nuremberg, flying above the royal procession. But, since Muller
died in 1436 and Charles was born in 1500, Muller may be ruled out from
among the pioneers of mechanical flight, and it may be concluded that
the historian of this event got slightly mixed in his dates.

Thus far, we have but indicated how one may draw from the richest
stores from which the Aryan mind draws inspiration, the Greek and Latin
mythologies and poetic adaptations of history. The existing legends of
flight, however, are not thus to be localised, for with two possible
exceptions they belong to all the world and to every civilisation,
however primitive. The two exceptions are the Aztec and the Chinese;
regarding the first of these, the Spanish conquistadores destroyed such
civilisation as existed in Tenochtitlan so thoroughly that, if legend
of flight was among the Aztec records, it went with the rest; as to the
Chinese, it is more than passing strange that they, who claim to have
known and done everything while the first of history was shaping, even
to antedating the discovery of gunpowder that was not made by Roger
Bacon, have not yet set up a claim to successful handling of a monoplane
some four thousand years ago, or at least to the patrol of the Gulf of
Korea and the Mongolian frontier by a forerunner of the 'blimp.'

The Inca civilisation of Peru yields up a myth akin to that of Icarus,
which tells how the chieftain Ayar Utso grew wings and visited the
sun--it was from the sun, too, that the founders of the Peruvian Inca
dynasty, Manco Capac and his wife Mama Huella Capac, flew to earth n