t
his audience.

"Yes! I know it well! After a century of experiments that have led to
nothing, and trials giving no results, there still exist ill-balanced
minds who believe in guiding balloons. They imagine that a motor of
some sort, electric or otherwise, might be applied to their
pretentious skin bags which are at the mercy of every current in the
atmosphere. They persuade themselves that they can be masters of an
aerostat as they can be masters of a ship on the surface of the sea.
Because a few inventors in calm or nearly calm weather have succeeded
in working an angle with the wind, or even beating to windward in a
gentle breeze, they think that the steering of aerial apparatus
lighter than the air is a practical matter. Well, now, look here; You
hundred, who believe in the realization of your dreams, are throwing
your thousands of dollars not into water but into space! You are
fighting the impossible!"

Strange as it was that at this affirmation the members of the Weldon
Institute did not move. Had they become as deaf as they were patient?
Or were they reserving themselves to see how far this audacious
contradictor would dare to go?

Robur continued: "What? A balloon! When to obtain the raising of a
couple of pounds you require a cubic yard of gas. A balloon
pretending to resist the wind by aid of its mechanism, when the
pressure of a light breeze on a vessel's sails is not less than that
of four hundred horsepower; when in the accident at the Tay Bridge
you saw the storm produce a pressure of eight and a half
hundredweight on a square yard. A balloon, when on such a system
nature has never constructed anything flying, whether furnished with
wings like birds, or membranes like certain fish, or certain mammalia--"

"Mammalia?" exclaimed one of the members.

"Yes! Mammalia! The bat, which flies, if I am not mistaken! Is the
gentleman unaware that this flyer is a mammal? Did he ever see an
omelette made of bat's eggs?"

The interrupter reserved himself for future interruption, and Robur
resumed: "But does that mean that man is to give up the conquest of
the air, and the transformation of the domestic and political manners
of the old world, by the use of this admirable means of locomotion?
By no means. As he has become master of the seas with the ship, by
the oar, the sail, the wheel and the screw, so shall he become master
of atmospherical space by apparatus heavier than the air--for it
must be heavier to b