rom his house in
the attempt to fly across the Seine, into which, regrettably, he fell.

Meanwhile the seventeenth-century philosophers had been theorizing. In
1638 John Wilkins, the founder of the Royal Society, published a book
entitled _Daedalus, or Mechanical Motions_. A few years later John
Glanville wrote in _Scepsis Scientifica_ "to them that come after us it
may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest regions,
as now a pair of boots to ride a journey," the sceptic proving a truer
prophet than the enthusiast. By 1680 Giovanni Borelli had reached the
conclusion, in his book _De Volatu_, that it was impossible that man
should ever achieve flight by his own strength. Nor was he more likely
to do so in the first aerial ship, designed in 1670 by Francesco Lana,
which was to be buoyed up in the air by being suspended from four
globes, made of thin copper sheeting, each of them about 25 feet in
diameter. From these globes the air was to be exhausted, so that each,
being lighter than the atmosphere, would support the weight of two or
three men. A hundred years elapsed before Dr. Joseph Black of the
University of Edinburgh made the first practical suggestion, that a
balloon inflated with hydrogen would rise.

THE INVENTION OF THE BALLOON.

It was in 1783 that Montgolfier conceived the idea of utilizing the
lifting power of hot air and invited the Assembly of Vivarais to watch
an exhibition of his invention, when a balloon, 10 feet in
circumference, rose to a height of 6,000 feet in under ten minutes. This
was followed by a demonstration before Louis XVI at Versailles, when a
balloon carrying a sheep, a cock, and a duck, rose 1,500 feet and
descended safely. And on November 21st of the same year Pilatre de
Rozier, accompanied by the Marquis d'Arlande, made the first human
ascent, in the "Reveillon," travelling 5 miles over Paris in twenty
minutes.

England, it is not surprising to learn, was behind with the invention,
but on November 25th, 1783, Count Francesco Zambeccari sent up from
Moorfields a small oilskin hydrogen balloon which fell at Petworth; and
in August of 1784 James Tytler ascended at Edinburgh in a fire balloon,
thus achieving the first ascent in Great Britain. In the same year
Lunardi came to London and ballooning became the rage. It was an
Englishman, Dr. Jefferies, who accompanied Blanchard in the first
cross-Channel flight on January 7th, 1785. Fashionable society soon
turned to