air. There were articles
in the monthly magazines of those days _proving_ that flying was
impossible.

One of the writer's luckiest shots was a description (in "Anticipations"
in 1900) of trench warfare, and of a deadlock almost exactly upon the
lines of the situation after the battle of the Marne. And he was
fortunate (in the same work) in his estimate of the limitations of
submarines. He anticipated Sir Percy Scott by a year in his doubts of
the decisive value of great battleships (_see_ "An Englishman Looks at
the World"); and he was sound in denying the decadence of France; in
doubting (before the Russo-Japanese struggle) the greatness of the power
of Russia, which was still in those days a British bogey; in making
Belgium the battle-ground in a coming struggle between the mid-European
Powers and the rest of Europe; and (he believes) in foretelling a
renascent Poland. Long before Europe was familiar with the engaging
personality of the German Crown Prince, he represented great airships
sailing over England (which country had been too unenterprising to make
any) under the command of a singularly anticipatory Prince Karl, and in
"The World Set Free" the last disturber of the peace is a certain
"Balkan Fox."

In saying, however, here and there that "before such a year so-and-so
will happen," or that "so-and-so will not occur for the next twenty
years," he was generally pretty widely wrong; most of his time estimates
are too short; he foretold, for example, a special motor track apart
from the high road between London and Brighton before 1910, which is
still a dream, but he doubted if effective military aviation or aerial
fighting would be possible before 1950, which is a miss on the other
side. He will draw a modest veil over certain still wider misses that
the idle may find for themselves in his books; he prefers to count the
hits and leave the reckoning of the misses to those who will find a
pleasure in it.

Of course, these prophecies of the writer's were made upon a basis of
very generalised knowledge. What can be done by a really sustained
research into a particular question--especially if it is a question
essentially mechanical--is shown by the work of a Frenchman all too
neglected by the trumpet of fame--Clement Ader. M. Ader was probably the
first man to get a mechanism up into the air for something more than a
leap. His _Eole_, as General Mensier testifies, prolonged a jump as far
as fifty metres as early