e 
On Aérial Navigation. 33 
the air; but who will deny that in chemistry, as in every other 
branch of natural knowledge, there exist palpable evidences of 
design and adaptation, either of man to these elements, or of 
the elements to the uses of man. I do not here allude to those 
self-evident and immediate adaptations, such as light to the eye, 
the structure of the lungs to the air we breathe, or of the sto- 
mach to the water we drink; but those more indirectly adapted 
to the pleasures, wants and conveniences of life: for instance, 
iron, which is certainly the most useful of the metals, is the most 
plentiful; its power of being made into steel for tools, capable, 
by so simple an art as that of being suddenly cooled, of acquiring 
any degree of hardness, so as even to cut steel itself ;—the ex- 
traordinary power it has of becoming so far in a state of fusion 
as to admit of being perfectly united under the hammer in a 
welding heat, without losing the form it had been previously 
wrought into, are, in the opinion of every enlightened workman, 
evidences of design in its chemical structure as respecting the 
- wants of mankind. No one can doubt that water, which seems 
to form the basis of all the vegetable and animal juices, was 
likewise designed as furnishing the means of navigation. Nature 
is no niggard of that which she designs for the uses of her crea- 
tures. The sun, in lighting up our enamelled acres, far outdoes 
the utmost brilliancy of our nocturnal ball-rooms; and to hire 
an acre of illumination equal to what this luminary bestows upon 
it gratis, would cost from thirty to forty thousand per annum. 
The very circumstance that every ton of water contains a power 
of giving two tons of floatage to heavy bodies within the atmo- 
sphere, is strong evidence that this may be intended as one of 
the uses of the chemical arrangement of this plentiful element. 
The rélative power of balloons to break away from their an- 
chorage in a storm of wind, decreases under the circumstances 
of magnitude and oblong structure I have proposed, in the same 
ratio with the decrease of their resistance in passing through the 
air. The horizontal drag of the balloon of fifty tons when at 
anchor, and exposed to the various degrees of wind in Mr.Smea- 
ton’s table, will be as follows : 
Miles per Hour. Tons. 
I 
. Highwind’ 4°) ..°' 2. 32% 
Very high wind .. .. 424 133 
Storm or tempest .. .. 50 19 
Great storm .. .. .. 60 27 
Hence, even in the great storm, if the boat be anchored to 
the earth, the wind would only cause the connecting ropes to 
ineline back to an angle of 33° with a perpendicular, and by no 
theans overcome the floating power and beat the ~balloon to the 
earth so as to endanger it; provided the strength of the materials 
Vol. 50. No. 231. July 1817. Cc were 
