persistently and with such valuable result.

At this point it may be noted that, with the solitary exception
of Le Bris, practically every student of flight had so far set
about constructing the means of launching humanity into the air
without any attempt at ascertaining the nature and peculiarities
of the sustaining medium. The attitude of experimenters in
general might be compared to that of a man who from boyhood had
grown up away from open water, and, at the first sight of an
expanse of water, set to work to construct a boat with a vague
idea that, since wood would float, only sufficient power was
required to make him an efficient navigator. Accident, perhaps,
in the shape of lack of means of procuring driving power, drove
Le Bris to the form of experiment which he actually carried out;
it remained for the later years of the nineteenth century to
produce men who were content to ascertain the nature of the
support the air would afford before attempting to drive
themselves through it.

Of the age in which these men lived and worked, giving their all
in many cases to the science they loved, even to life itself, it
may be said with truth that 'there were giants on the earth in
those days,' as far as aeronautics is in question. It was an
age of giants who lived and dared and died, venturing into
uncharted space, knowing nothing of its dangers, giving, as a
man gives to his mistress, without stint and for the joy of the
giving. The science of to-day, compared with the glimmerings
that were in that age of the giants, is a fixed and certain
thing; the problems of to-day are minor problems, for the great
major problem vanished in solution when the Wright Brothers made