briefly to adduce experiences coming within my own knowledge, I
would say that it is to his very impulsiveness that the
enthusiast often owes the safety of his neck. It is the timid,
not the bold rider, that comes to grief at the fence. It is
the man who draws back who is knocked over by a tramcar. Sheer
impetus, moral or physical, often carries you through, as in
the case of a fall from horse-back. To tumble off when your
horse is standing still and receive a dead blow from the ground
might easily break a limb. But at full gallop immunity often
lies in the fact that you strike the earth at an angle, and
being carried forward, impact is less abrupt. I can only say
that I have on more than one occasion found the greatest safety
in a balloon venture involving the element of risk to lie in
complete abandonment to circumstances, and in the increased
life and activity which the delirium of excitement calls forth.
In comparing, however, man's first ventures by sky with those
by sea, we must remember what far greater demand the former
must have made upon the spirit of enterprise and daring.

We can picture the earliest sea voyager taking his first lesson
astride of a log with one foot on the bottom, and thus
proceeding by sure stages till he had built his coracle and
learned to paddle it in shoal water. But the case was wholly
different when the first frail air ship stood at her moorings
with straining gear and fiercely burning furnace, and when the
sky sailor knew that no course was left him but to dive boldly
up into an element whence there was no stepping back, and
separated from earth by a gulf which man instinctively dreads
to look down upon.