men gave themselves to their art; the story of Lilienthal's life
and death is the story of his work; the story of Pilcher's work
is that of his life and death.

Considering the flying man as he appeared in the war period,
there entered into his composition a new element--patriotism--
which brought about a modification of the type, or, perhaps, made
it appear that certain men belonged to the type who in reality
were commonplace mortals, animated, under normal conditions, by
normal motives, but driven by the stress of the time to take rank
with the last expression of human energy, the flying type.
However that may be, what may be termed the mathematising of
aeronautics has rendered the type itself evanescent; your pilot
of to-day knows his craft, once he is trained, much in the manner
that a driver of a motor-lorry knows his vehicle; design has been
systematised, capabilities have been tabulated; camber, dihedral
angle, aspect ratio, engine power, and plane surface, are
business items of drawing office and machine shop; there is room
for enterprise, for genius, and for skill; once and again there
is room for daring, as in the first Atlantic flight. Yet that
again was a thing of mathematical calculation and petrol storage,
allied to a certain stark courage which may be found even in
landsmen. For the ventures into the unknown, the limit of
daring, the work for work's sake, with the almost certainty that
the final reward was death, we must look back to the age of the
giants, the age when flying was not a business, but romance.



VII. LILIENTHAL AND PILCHER