dream of many peoples--man always wanted to fly, and imagined
means of flight.

In this age of steel, a very great part of the inventive genius
of man has gone into devices intended to facilitate transport,
both of men and goods, and the growth of civilisation is in
reality the facilitation of transit, improvement of the means of
communication. He was a genius who first hoisted a sail on a
boat and saved the labour of rowing; equally, he who first
harnessed ox or dog or horse to a wheeled vehicle was a
genius--and these looked up, as men have looked up from the
earliest days of all, seeing that the birds had solved the
problem of transit far more completely than themselves. So it
must have appeared, and there is no age in history in which some
dreamers have not dreamed of the conquest of the air; if the
caveman had left records, these would without doubt have showed
that he, too, dreamed this dream. His main aim, probably, was
self-preservation; when the dinosaur looked round the corner,
the prehistoric bird got out of the way in his usual manner, and
prehistoric manÄ such of him as succeeded in getting out of the
way after his fashion--naturally envied the bird, and concluded
that as lord of creation in a doubtful sort of way he ought to
have equal facilities. He may have tried, like Simon the
Magician, and other early experimenters, to improvise those
facilities; assuming that he did, there is the groundwork of
much of the older legend with regard to men who flew, since,
when history began, legends would be fashioned out of attempts
and even the desire to fly, these being compounded of some small
ingredient of truth and much exaggeration and addition.