Wonderful Balloon Ascents; Or, The Conquest of the Skies

began to know something more of the forces of nature. One of the first of these travellers in imagination to the moon in modern times was Godwin (1638), and his plan was more ingenious than that of Lucian. He trained a great number of the wild swans of St. Helena to fly constantly upward toward a white object, and, having succeeded in thus training them, one fine night he threw himself off the Peak of Teneriffe, poised upon a piece of board, which was borne upward to the white moon by a great team of the gigantic swans. At the end of twelve days he arrived, according to his story, at his destination. A little later another writer of this peculiar kind of fiction, Wilkins, an Englishman, professed to have made the same ascent, borne up by an eagle. Alexandre Dumas, who recently wrote a short romance upon the same subject, only made a translation of an English work by that author. Wilkins’ work is entitled, “The Discovery of a New World.” One chapter of the book bears the title, “That ‘tis possible for some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world; and, if there be inhabitants there, to have commerce with them.” It is thus that the right reverend philosopher reasons:-- “If it be here inquired what means there may be conjectured for our ascending beyond the sphere of the earth’s mathematical vigour, I answer.--1. ‘Tis not possible that a man may be able to fly by the application of wings to his own body, as angels are pictured, as Mercury and Daedalus are feigned, and as hath been attempted by divers, particularly by a Turk in Constantinople, a Busbequius relates. 2. If there be such a great duck in Madagascar as Marcus Polus, the Venetian, mentions, the feathers of whose wings are twelve feet long, which can scoop up a horse and his rider, or an elephant, as our kites do a mouse; why, then, ‘Tis but teaching one of these to carry a man, and he may ride up thither, as Ganymede does upon an eagle. 3. Or if neither of these ways will serve yet I do seriously, and upon good grounds, affirm it is possible to make a flying chariot, in which a man may sit and give such a motion to it as shall convey him through the air. And this, perhaps, might be made large enough to carry divers men at the same time, together with food for their viaticum, and commodities for traffic. It is not the bigness of