e. He is a new type,
this flying man, a being of self-forgetfulness; of such was Lilienthal,
of such was Pilcher; of such in later days were Farman, Bleriot, Hamel,
Rolls, and their fellows; great names that will live for as long as man
flies, adventurers equally with those of the spacious days of Elizabeth.
To each of these came the call, and he worked and dared and passed,
having, perhaps, advanced one little step in the long march that has led
toward the perfecting of flight.

It is not yet twenty years since man first flew, but into that twenty
years have been compressed a century or so of progress, while, in the
two decades that preceded it, was compressed still more. We have only to
recall and recount the work of four men: Lilienthal, Langley, Pilcher,
and Clement Ader to see the immense stride that was made between the
time when Penaud pulled a trigger for the last time and the Wright
Brothers first left the earth. Into those two decades was compressed the
investigation that meant knowledge of the qualities of the air, together
with the development of the one prime mover that rendered flight a
possibility--the internal combustion engine. The coming and progress of
this latter is a thing apart, to be detailed separately; for the present
we are concerned with the evolution of the driven plane, and with it the
evolution of that daring being, the flying man. The two are inseparable,
for the men gave themselves to their art; the story of Lilienthal's life
and death is the story of his work; the story of Pilcher's work is that
of his life and death.

Considering the flying man as he appeared in the war period, there
entered into his composition a new element--patriotism--which brought
about a modification of the type, or, perhaps, made it appear that
certain men belonged to the type who in reality were commonplace
mortals, animated, under normal conditions, by normal motives, but
driven by the stress of the time to take rank with the last expression
of human energy, the flying type. However that may be, what may be
termed the mathematising of aeronautics has rendered the type itself
evanescent; your pilot of to-day knows his craft, once he is trained,
much in the manner that a driver of a motor-lorry knows his vehicle;
design has been systematised, capabilities have been tabulated; camber,
dihedral angle, aspect ratio, engine power, and plane surface, are
business items of drawing office and machine shop; there is roo