een enclosed." We need no
more. That was an age of flying saints, as also of flying dragons.
Flying in those days of yore may have been real enough to the multitude,
but it was at best delusion. In the good old times it did not need the
genius of a Maskelyne to do a "levitation" trick. We can picture the
scene at a "flying seance." On the one side the decidedly professional
showman possessed of sufficient low cunning; on the other the ignorant
and highly superstitious audience, eager to hear or see some new
thing--the same audience that, deceived by a simple trick of schoolboy
science, would listen to supernatural voices in their groves, or
oracular utterances in their temples, or watch the urns of Bacchus fill
themselves with wine. Surely for their eyes it would need no more than
the simplest phantasmagoria, or maybe only a little black thread, to
make a pigeon rise and fly.

It is interesting to note, however, that in the case last cited there is
unquestionably an allusion to some crude form of firework, and what more
likely or better calculated to impress the ignorant! Our firework makers
still manufacture a "little Devil." Pyrotechnic is as old as history
itself; we have an excellent description of a rocket in a document at
least as ancient as the ninth century. And that a species of pyrotechny
was resorted to by those who sought to imitate flight we have proof in
the following recipe for a flying body given by a Doctor, eke a Friar,
in Paris in the days of our King John:--

"Take one pound of sulphur, two pounds of willowcarbon, six pounds of
rock salt ground very fine in a marble mortar. Place, when you please,
in a covering made of flying papyrus to produce thunder. The covering
in order to ascend and float away should be long, graceful, well filled
with this fine powder; but to produce thunder the covering should be
short, thick, and half full."

Nor does this recipe stand alone. Take another sample, of which chapter
and verse are to be found in the MSS. of a Jesuit, Gaspard Schott, of
Palermo and Rome, born three hundred years ago:--

"The shells of hen-eggs, if properly filled and well secured against the
penetration of the air, and exposed to solar rays, will ascend to the
skies and sometimes suffer a natural change. And if the eggs of the
larger description of swans, or leather balls stitched with fine
thongs, be filled with nitre, the purest sulphur quicksilver, or kindred
materials which rarify by thei