Page:Bedford-Jones--Boy Scouts of the Air at Cape Peril.djvu/159

 flabby, wop of a numskull. That what you're aiming for?"

"Naw," conceded Cat, "not all that."

"Well! Come back to common sense and stay there.

"Now to come down to modern times, there was a monk in Spain along about the fourteenth century who is said to have jumped from a tower with a parachute sort of contrivance and flown some distance. Then, in the seventeenth century, there was a locksmith who made a flying device. He began by jumping out of the first story window, like a disappointed lover I heard of once who tried to commit suicide that way."

"Ha! ha!" said Cat. "Some bold inventor he was. 'S'pose he jumped into a net, too."

"But, my dear Catboy, don't you know you can't put your foot on the top round of the ladder first thing? Every invention has been worked to a finish by a chain of people feeling their way in that direction, in some cases through hundreds of years. Every big bug you hear of in any line of invention is standing on the top of the brains of folks you don't see, some of them as dead as Caesar thousands of years.