was too much for his apparatus, and turning
over and over in mid-air he finally landed ingloriously on a manure
heap--at that period of nascent culture a very common feature of the
pleasure grounds of a palace. He had a soul above his fate however,
for he ascribed his fall not to vulgar mechanical causes, but wholly
to the fact that he had overlooked the proper dignity of flight by
pluming his wings with the feathers of common barn-yard fowl instead
of with plumes plucked from the wings of eagles!

In sharp competition with the aspiring souls who sought to fly with
wings--the forerunners of the airplane devotees of to-day--were
those who tried to find some direct lifting device for a car which
should contain the aviators. Some of their ideas were curiously
logical and at the same time comic. There was, for example, a
priest, Le Pere Galien of Avignon. He observed that the rarified air
at the summit of the Alps was vastly lighter than that in the
valleys below. What then was to hinder carrying up empty sacks of
cotton or oiled silk to the mountain tops, opening them to the
lighter air of the upper ranges, and sealing them hermetically when
filled by it. When brought down into the valleys they would have
lifting power enough to carry tons up to the summits again. The good
Father's education in physics was not sufficiently advanced to warn
him that the effort to drag the balloons down into the valley would
exact precisely the force they would exert in lifting any load out
of the valley--if indeed they possessed any lifting power
whatsoever, which is exceedingly doubtful.

Another project, which sounded logical enough, was based on the
irrefutable truth that as air has some weight--to be exact 14.70
pounds for a column one inch square and the height of the earth's
atmosphere--a vacuum must be lighter, as it contains nothing, not
even air. Accordingly in the seventeenth century, one Francisco
Lana, another priest, proposed to build an airship supported by four
globes of copper, very thin and light, from which all the air had
been pumped. The globes were to be twenty feet in diameter, and were
estimated to have a lifting force of 2650 pounds. The weight of the
copper shells was put at 1030 pounds, leaving a margin of possible
weight for the car and its contents of 1620 pounds. It seemed at
first glance a perfectly reasonable and logical plan. Unhappily one
factor in the problem had been ignored. The atmospheric pressure on