height of 50 feet, breaking his spine, and the next day he died.

It may be said that Lilienthal accomplished as much as any one
of the great pioneers of flying. As brilliant in his
conceptions as da Vinci had been in his, and as conscientious a
worker as Borelli, he laid the foundations on which Pilcher,
Chanute, and Professor Montgomery were able to build to such
good purpose. His book on bird flight, published in 1889, with
the authorship credited both to Otto and his brother Gustav, is
regarded as epoch-making; his gliding experiments are no less
entitled to this description.

In England Lilienthal's work was carried on by Percy Sinclair
Pilcher, who, born in 1866, completed six years' service in the
British Navy by the time that he was nineteen, and then went
through a course of engineering, subsequently joining Maxim in
his experimental work. It was not until 1895 that he began
to build the first of the series of gliders with which he earned
his plane among the pioneers of flight. Probably the best
account of Pilcher's work is that given in the Aeronautical
Classics issued by the Royal Aeronautical Society, from which
the following account of Pilcher's work is mainly abstracted.[*]

[*] Aeronautical Classes, No. 5. Royal Aeronautical Society
publications.

The 'Bat,' as Pilcher named his first glider, was a monoplane
which he completed before he paid his visit to Lilienthal in
1895. Concerning this Pilcher stated that he purposely finished
his own machine before going to see Lilienthal, so as to get the