the world and to every civilisation, however primitive. The two
exceptions are the Aztec and the Chinese; regarding the first of
these, the Spanish conquistadores destroyed such civilisation as
existed in Tenochtitlan so thoroughly that, if legend of flight
was among the Aztec records, it went with the rest; as to the
Chinese, it is more than passing strange that they, who claim to
have known and done everything while the first of history was
shaping, even to antedating the discovery of gunpowder that was
not made by Roger Bacon, have not yet set up a claim to
successful handling of a monoplane some four thousand years ago,
or at least to the patrol of the Gulf of Korea and the Mongolian
frontier by a forerunner of the 'blimp.'

The Inca civilisation of Peru yields up a myth akin to that of
Icarus, which tells how the chieftain Ayar Utso grew wings and
visited the sun--it was from the sun, too, that the founders of
the Peruvian Inca dynasty, Manco Capac and his wife Mama Huella
Capac, flew to earth near Lake Titicaca, to make the only
successful experiment in pure tyranny that the world has ever
witnessed. Teutonic legend gives forth Wieland the Smith, who
made himself a dress with wings and, clad in it, rose and
descended against the wind and in spite of it. Indian mythology,
in addition to the story of the demons and their rigid dirigible,
already quoted, gives the story of Hanouam, who fitted himself
with wings by means of which he sailed in the air and, according
to his desire, landed in the sacred Lauka. Bladud, the ninth
king of Britain, is said to have crowned his feats of wizardry by
making himself wings and attempting to fly--but the effort cost
him a broken neck. Bladud may have been as mythic as Uther, and
again he may have been a very early pioneer. The Finnish epic,