CHAPTER: I: 
Concerning Wings. 
“Divinity within them breeding wings 
wherewith to scorn the earth.’’—Mzilion. 
What a wing is—The quill feathers and their function—The skeleton of the 
wing—The muscles of the wing—The great air-chambers of the body—The Bat'’s 
wing—The wing of flying Dragons—The wings of Dragon-flies and beetles. 
HE flight of birds has always aroused man’s envy and 
stirred his imagination. David longed for the wings of a 
dove: the writer of the Book of Proverbs tells us that “‘ the 
way of an eagle” 
surpasses his understanding. Icarus, spurred 
on by dire necessity, actually, we are told, contrived to fly 
—but his maiden effort ended in disaster! To-day we have, 
in a sense, succeeded where he failed. But only because we have 
given up the idea of flight by personal effort, and make our 
aerial journeys in a flying machine. 
That we owe much of our success to a study of the flight of 
birds is common knowledge, but the machine which has evolved 
as a consequence of this study pursues its way through the air 
after a very different fashion from that of the birds, for its vast 
