one of the things that is well outside the province of
aeronautics. He was charlatan pure and simple, as far as actual flight
was concerned, though he had some ideas respecting the design of hot-air
balloons, according to Tissandier. (La Navigation Aerienne.) His
flying machine was to contain, among other devices, bellows to produce
artificial wind when the real article failed, and also magnets in globes
to draw the vessel in an upward direction and maintain its buoyancy.
Some draughtsman, apparently gifted with as vivid imagination as Guzman
himself, has given to the world an illustration of the hypothetical
vessel; it bears some resemblance to Lana's aerial ship, from which fact
one draws obvious conclusions.

A rather amusing claim to solving the problem of flight was made in the
middle of the eighteenth century by one Grimaldi, a 'famous and unique
Engineer' who, as a matter of actual fact, spent twenty years in
missionary work in India, and employed the spare time that missionary
work left him in bringing his invention to a workable state. The
invention is described as a 'box which with the aid of clockwork rises
in the air, and goes with such lightness and strong rapidity that it
succeeds in flying a journey of seven leagues in an hour. It is made in
the fashion of a bird; the wings from end to end are 25 feet in extent.
The body is composed of cork, artistically joined together and well
fastened with metal wire, covered with parchment and feathers. The
wings are made of catgut and whalebone, and covered also with the same
parchment and feathers, and each wing is folded in three seams. In the
body of the machine are contained thirty wheels of unique work, with two
brass globes and little chains which alternately wind up a counterpoise;
with the aid of six brass vases, full of a certain quantity of
quicksilver, which run in some pulleys, the machine is kept by the
artist in due equilibrium and balance. By means, then, of the friction
between a steel wheel adequately tempered and a very heavy and
surprising piece of lodestone, the whole is kept in a regulated forward
movement, given, however, a right state of the winds, since the machine
cannot fly so much in totally calm weather as in stormy. This prodigious
machine is directed and guided by a tail seven palmi long, which is
attached to the knees and ankles of the inventor by leather straps; by
stretching out his legs, either to the right or to the left, he moves