CHAPTER I 
Concerning Wings 
“Divinity within them breeding wings 
wherewith to scorn the earth.” 
MILTON. 
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 body is thrust, or drawn, through the air by means 
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