132 CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



During the night of their adventurous journey, the aeronauts per- 

 ceived the cold to be very intense, the thermometer ranging various- 

 ly from within a fev/ degrees below to the point of congelation. 

 Their supplies of water, coffee, and oil were completely frozen in 

 their several vessels. Strange, however, as the statement may ap- 

 pear, Mr. Monck Mason observes, while all around bore unequivocal 

 testimony to the severity of the cold, the effects produced upon their 

 persons, although undefended by any extraordinary precaution, 

 were by no means commensurate to the cause, nor such as even, 

 under ordinary circumstances, the party might fairly have expected 

 to encounter. This unusual exemption from the consequences of a 

 low temperature is ascribed by ]\Ir. M. to the absence of all current 

 of air, the natural result of their situation, and one of the peculiar 

 characteristics of aerial navigation. To this intensity of cold, pre- 

 ceded by a long subjection to the action of a humid atmosphere, he 

 likewise attributes the occurrence of an incident which merits par- 

 ticularly to be noticed. It is thus in Mr. M's. own words : — 



" It was about half-past three in the morning when the balloon, having 

 gained a sudden accession of power, owing to a discbarge of ballast, began to 

 rise with consicleral)le rapidity, and ere we liad taken the customary means to 

 check her ascent, had already attained an elevation of upwards of twelve 

 thousand feet. At this moment, while all around is impenetrable darkness 

 and stillness, an unusual explosion issues from the machine above, followed 

 instantaneously by a violent rustling of the silk and all the signs which may 

 be supposed to accompany the bursting of the balloon in a region where no- 

 thing but itself exists to give occasion to such awful and unnatural disturb- 

 ance. In the same instant the car, as if suddenly detached from its hold, 

 becomes subjected to a violent concussion, and appears at once to be in the 

 act of sinking with all its contents into the dark abyss below. A second and 

 a third explosion follow in quick succession, accom])anied by a recin-rence of 

 the same astounding effects ; leaving not a doubt upon the mind of the un- 

 conscious voyager of the fate which nothing now ajipears ca])able of averting. 

 In a moment after, all is trancjiiil and sei'ene : the balloon has recovered her 

 usual form and stillness, and nothing ajipears to designate the unnatural agi- 

 tation to which she had been so lately and unaccountably subjected. The 

 occurrence of this phenomenon, however strange it may appear, is neverthe- 

 less susceptible of the simplest resolution, and consists in the tendency to en- 

 largement from remotion of pressure which the balloon experiences in rising 

 from a low to a higher position in the atmospiiere, and the resistance to this 

 enlargement occasionecl by the net-work, previously saturated with moisture 

 and subsequently congealed into the elliptical form which the dependent 

 weight of the car obliges it to assume whenever tlie shrunken capacity of the 

 sphere it encompasses will admit of its longitudinal distension. As this re- 

 sistance is occasioned by the intervention of a non-elastic medium — the ice — 

 which has bound the neshes of the net-work in their contracted form, it is 

 evident that the liberation occasioned by their disrupture will not take place 

 imtil the internal pressure of the balloon has reached a certain amount, and 

 then suddenly that liberation is accomplished, attended by those collateral ef- 

 fects which have already been described. The impression of the descent of 

 the car, in the above representation, is evidently a false one : the car, so lar 

 from sinking, actually springs up : it is the unexjiectedness of such a move- 

 ment, and its ajiparent inconsistency' with the laws ot gravitation, that occa- 

 sions the delusion, the reality of which the concomitant circumstances essen- 

 tially tend to confirn." 



