great shock, splintering, a heavy concussion: we had landed.'

Thus speaks the inventor; the cold official mind gives out a
different account, crediting the 'Avion' with merely a few hops,
and to-day, among those who consider the problem at all, there
is a little group which persists in asserting that to Ader
belongs the credit of the first power-driven flight, while a
larger group is equally persistent in stating that, save for a
few ineffectual hops, all three wheels of the machine never left
the ground. It is past question that the 'Avion' was capable of
power-driven flight; whether it achieved it or no remains an
unsettled problem.

Ader's work is negative proof of the value of such experiments
as Lilienthal, Pilcher, Chanute, and Montgomery conducted; these
four set to work to master the eccentricities of the air before
attempting to use it as a supporting medium for continuous
flight under power; Ader attacked the problem from the other
end; like many other experimenters he regarded the air as a
stable fluid capable of giving such support to his machine as
still water might give to a fish, and he reckoned that he had
only to produce the machine in order to achieve flight. The
wrecked 'Avion' and the refusal of the French War Ministry to
grant any more funds for further experiment are sufficient
evidence of the need for working along the lines taken by the
pioneers of gliding rather than on those which Ader himself
adopted.

Let it not be thought that in this comment there is any desire
to derogate from the position which Ader should occupy in any