formed the field which from that time was to lie open to the
investigations of man.

This enthusiasm one can well enough understand. There is in the
simple fact of an aerial ascent something so bold and so
astonishing, that the human spirit cannot fail to be profoundly
stirred by it. And if this is the feeling of men at the present
day, when, after having been witnesses of ascents for the last
eighty years, they see men confiding themselves in a swinging car
into the immensities of space, what must have been the
astonishment of those who, for the first time since the
commencement of the world, beheld one of their fellow-creatures
rolling in space, without any other assurance of safety than what
his still dim perception of the laws of nature gave him?

Why should we be obliged here to state that the great discovery
that stirred the spirits of men from the one end of Europe to the
other, and gave rise to hopes of such vast discoveries, should
have failed in realising the expectations which seemed so clearly
justified by the first experiments? It is now eighty-six years
since the first aerial journey astonished the world, and yet, in
1870, we are but little more advanced in the science than we were
in 1783. Our age is the most renowned for its discoveries of any
that the world has seen. Man is borne over the surface of the
earth by steam; he is as familiar as the fish with the liquid
element; he transmits his words instantaneously from London to
New York; he draws pictures without pencil or brush, and has made
the sun his slave. The air alone remains to him unsubdued. The
proper management of balloons has not yet been discovered. More
than that, it appears that balloons are unmanageable, and it is