184 Historical 



of the nature of the gas with which he inflated his balloon; he 

 used oxide of carbon which took him to 11,000 feet. JT But this 

 does not concern our subject. 



April 20, 1831, Dr. Forster 28 with Green made a balloon trip 

 which did not exceed an elevation of 6000 feet, a height at which 

 they remained for four hours. Their physiological observations 

 referred only to the phenomena of deafness which attack mountain 

 travellers and aeronauts. Forster considers them as having very 

 different causes in the two cases, due in the first to a feeling of 

 fullness in the ears, and in the second to a real weakening of the 

 hearing. 



The extravagant exaggeration of Green's statements begins 

 to appear in a note of the publisher of Froriep's Notizen, 29 which 

 reports naively that Green had made 226 ascents, in which he had 

 several times gone above 6000 fathoms, without experiencing diffi- 

 culty in breathing. 



The story which Green 30 himself gave of the catastrophe by 

 which, September 27, 1836, his companion Cocking lost his life, 

 indicates a height which perhaps should not be considered 

 accurate. We know that Green played a very sorry role in this 

 mad adventure. Cocking had made a parachute wrong side out, 

 the absurdity of which no one could doubt; Green consented 

 nevertheless to take it along. The unhappy Cocking unfastened 

 his parachute just as the balloon reached the height of 5000 feet; 

 he fell like a stone. At the same time, the balloon, freed of his 

 weight, darted upward to great heights: 



We rose then with such rapidity that we were almost suffocated; 

 with great difficulty I controlled my senses enough to observe the ba- 

 rometer; but M. Spencer observed that the mercury stopped at 13.20, 

 which gives an elevation of 24,384 feet (7430 meters), or about 4*4 

 miles. 



But that is nothing beside what he told of an ascent made with 

 Rusch; the pathologist Henle u reports this prodigious statement 

 as a very simple thing, and without making any comment: 



In his balloon ascents, Green says he never experienced any 

 acceleration of the pulse or of the respiration, except when he rose 

 rapidly after throwing out ballast. 



In 1838 he rose with Rusch to the height of 27,136 feet (8268 

 meters), where he saw the mercury drop to 10.32 inches; he passed 

 through the first 11,000 feet (3350 meters) in 7 minutes, without any 

 inconvenience except those mentioned above. (P. 386.) 



Tall tales are useless! An Italian aeronaut claimed to have 



