3go Blighty Aspirations. [June, 
sufficient to afford him support, but I think it very possible 
and probable that he may construdt an apparatus with sur- 
face sufficiently large to sustain him and the additional 
weight of a motor powerful enough to attack the air so as 
to obtain support and proportions from it. 
We know that the long-winged bird, such as an albatross, 
has a very flexible wing, which hangs quite droopingly from 
the body, and which being vibrated produces a wave-adtion 
from the root of the wing to the tip. 
It is not the lot of many who will read this paper to shake 
carpets, but to all it will be understood how the wave of air 
compressed in the downward shake is propelled underneath, 
so as to throw the carpet into waves, and how — if with suf- 
ficient power — those waves are bound to escape at the 
opposite side ; and if with rapidity of wave-adtion, how the 
carpet may be made to hover above the floor without con- 
tact. Suppose that we can communicate such an undulation 
to a fabric free to vibrate in the air ; then its progress would 
be exactly opposite to the direction of the wave, and it would 
entirely depend upon the power that we could employ to 
enable us to determine what weight of fabric could be thus 
thrown into wave-adtion, and thereby supported and pro- 
pelled ; or, in other words, how light a fabric could be used, 
and what additional weight could be substituted. Had Mr. 
Linfield’s arrangement of 300 square feet of fabric been 
provided with the power to impart this wave-adtion, a very 
different result might have been recorded. .... 
All the experiments which I have made in this diredtion, 
with models set free in the air, have pointed to probable 
success when manufadtured upon a scale of utility. dhis 
means the capability of sustaining and propelling 1 lb. of 
weight for every square foot of surface, and this capacity 
ought to be sufficient to provide for the sustentation of the 
necessary motive power. The adtion of such an apparatus 
may be thus described : — A kite-like strudture, the two arms 
of which are not fixed like the kite, but are free to move, in 
the manner of the wings of a bird, with a sweep of perhaps 
6 feet ; width of such arms from tip to tip, 20 feet ; the 
fabric attached to the arms, and extended backwards some 
30 feet, affording with its triangular shape above 300 square 
feet ; from thence a tail, capable of elevation or depression ; 
the whole capable, by the aid of steam, of adting upon a 
stratum of air of perhaps 3000 cubic feet. 
It may be disputed—as it has been- 8 — that a fabric shaken 
as described has any propelling tendency, because, say the 
