395 
FLIGHT AND ITS IMITATION. 
By FRED. W. BREAREY, Hon. Sec. Aeronautical Society of Great 
HE persistence with which men in all ages, as far as history 
travels, have pursued the study of flight, proves that there 
is a better foundation than the mere wish to fly in favour of 
their aspirations. The hope has outlived the empirical attempts 
of our progenitors. The same examples of flight are presented 
to us as to them. We have equally looked upon accomplished 
facts, viz., the transportation of heavy bodies in a medium so 
thin that we breathe it. 
Some time previously to the Montgolfier discovery, M. 
Blanchard had made several unsuccessful attempts at flight by 
means of wings. He hailed with renewed hope the invention of 
the balloon, by the aid of which he thought that he could attain 
the buoyancy denied to him by the manipulation of wings alone ; 
not only, however, is buoyancy destructive to mechanical flight, 
but the magnitude of the means employed to obtain it dwarfed 
all his apparatus. The effort at flight was imperceptible ; and 
at length he used his wings in beating the air so as to re- 
tard descent, which in some cases he no doubt achieved. The 
balloon remains as an aid to man, not yet sufficiently utilized, 
although in the sense of aerial navigation its scope is too limited 
ever to be of commercial utility. The bird in the air, however, 
still continues to present itself a living witness and fulfilment 
of a great mechanical problem up to the present time unadapted 
to man’s aerial transit. All the great inventions by which the 
world has benefited have been worked out in the study, and often 
in the ill-supplied workshop of the man of science, sometimes for 
ages before the money-maker deemed them worthy of his atten- 
tion. And so, during these latter years, the subject of aerial navi- 
gation has been approached with the certain knowledge that if its 
solution lies in the adoption of mechanical means, in compliance 
with mechanical laws, then the problem must of necessity be 
solved by the increased, and increasing, knowledge and intellect 
of man. What, then, is the foundation for the hope that man 
Britain, 
