since been rebuilt and is now in the National Museum
of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington.
Linfield's Unsuccessful Efforts.

In 1878 Mr. Linfield tested an apparatus in England
consisting of a cigar-shaped car, to which was attached
on each side frames five feet square, containing each
twenty-five superposed planes of stretched and varnished
linen eighteen inches wide, and only two inches apart,
thus reminding one of a Spanish donkey with panniers.
The whole weighed two hundred and forty pounds. This
was tested by being mounted on a flat car behind a
locomotive going 40 miles an hour. When towed by a line
fifteen feet long the apparatus rose only a little from the
car and exhibited such unstable equilibrium that the
experiment was not renewed. The lift was only about one-
third of what it would have been had the planes been
properly spaced, say their full width apart, instead of
one-ninth as erroneously devised.

Renard's "Dirigible Parachute."

In 1889 Commandant Renard, the eminent superintendent
of the French Aeronautical Department, exhibited
at the Paris Exposition of that year, an apparatus
experimented with some years before, which he termed
a "dirigible parachute." It consisted of an oviform body
to which were pivoted two upright slats carrying above
the body nine long superposed flat blades spaced about
one-third of their width apart. When this apparatus