e spirit, but by a grave and
learned professor of physical science, Pilatre de Rozier. Presently
he was joined in his enterprise by a young man of the fashionable
world and sporting tastes, the Marquis d'Arlandes. Aristocratic
Paris took up aviation in the last days of the eighteenth century,
precisely as the American leisure class is taking it up in the first
days of the twentieth.

The balloon for this adventure was bigger than its predecessors and
for the first time a departure was taken from the spherical
variety--the gas bag being seventy-four feet high, and forty-eight
feet in diameter. Like the first Montgolfier balloons it was to be
inflated with hot air, and the car was well packed with bundles of
fuel with which the two aeronauts were to fill the iron brazier when
its fires went down. The instinct for art and decoration, so strong
in the French mind, had been given full play by the constructors of
this balloon and it was painted with something of the gorgeousness
of a circus poster.

A tremendous crowd packed the park near Paris whence the ascent was
made. Always the spectacle of human lives in danger has a morbid
attraction for curiosity seekers, and we have seen in our own days
throngs attracted to aviation congresses quite as much in the
expectation of witnessing some fatal disaster, as to observe the
progress made in man's latest conquest over nature. But in this
instance the occasion justified the widest interest. It was an
historic moment--more epoch-making than those who gathered in that
field in the environs of Paris could have possibly imagined. For in
the clumsy, gaudy bag, rolling and tossing above a smoky fire lay
the fundamentals of those great airships that, perfected by the
persistence of Count Zeppelin, have crossed angry seas, breasted
fierce winds, defied alike the blackest nights and the thickest fogs
to rain their messages of death on the capital of a foe.

Contemporary accounts of this first ascension are but few, and those
that have survived have come down to us in but fragmentary form. It
was thought needful for two to make the ascent, for the car, or
basket, which held the fire hung below the open mouth of the bag,
and the weight of a man on one side would disturb the perfect
equilibrium which it was believed would be essential to a successful
flight. The Marquis d'Arlandes in a published account of the brief
flight, which sounds rather as if the two explorers of an unknown
element