It may have been on account of the reluctance of this same or
another driver that Le Bris chose a different method of
launching himself in making a second experiment with his
albatross. He chose the edge of a quarry which had been
excavated in a depression of the ground; here he assembled his
apparatus at the bottom of the quarry, and by means of a rope
was hoisted to a height of nearly 100 ft. from the quarry
bottom, this rope being attached to a mast which he had erected
upon the edge of the depression in which the quarry was
situated. Thus hoisted, the albatross was swung to face a
strong breeze that blew inland, and Le Bris manipulated his
levers to give the front edges of his wings a downward angle, so
that only the top surfaces should take the wing pressure. Having
got his balance, he obtained a lifting angle of incidence on the
wings by means of his levers, and released the hook that secured
the machine, gliding off over the quarry. On the glide he met
with the inevitable upward current of air that the quarry and
the depression in which it was situated caused; this current
upset the balance of the machine and flung it to the bottom of
the quarry, breaking it to fragments. Le Bris, apparently as
intrepid as ingenious, gripped the mast from which his levers
were worked, and, springing upward as the machine touched earth,
escaped with no more damage than a broken leg. But for the
rebound of the levers he would have escaped even this.

The interest of these experiments is enhanced by the fact that
Le Bris was a seafaring man who conducted them from love of the
science which had fired his imagination, and in so doing
exhausted his own small means. It was in 1855 that he made