Page:Wonderful Balloon Ascents, 1870.djvu/148

130 machine, while I take the practical direction of it." The following is this aeronaut's prospectus:—

"There is no limit to the sciences and the arts, which cultivation does not overstep. We have everything to hope and to expect from time, from chance, and from the genius of man. The difference which there is between the canoe of the savage and the man-of-war of 124 guns is perhaps as great as that of balloons as they now are and as they will be in the course of a century. If you ask of an aeronaut why he cannot command the motions of his balloon, he will ask of you in his turn why the inventor of the canoe did not immediately afterwards construct a man-of-war. It must be recollected that there have not yet elapsed forty years since the discovery of the balloon, and that to perfect it would be a work of difficulty, as much from the increased knowledge which such a work would demand, as from the pecuniary sacrifices and the personal devotion which it would involve.

"Thus this invention, after having at first electrified all savants from the one end of the world to the other, has suffered the fate of all discoveries—it was all at once arrested. Did not astronomy wait long for Newton, and chemistry for Lavoisier, to raise them to something like the splendour they now enjoy? Was not the magnet a long time a toy in the hands of the Chinese, without giving birth to the idea of the compass? The electric fluid was known in the time of Thales, but how many ages did we wait for the discovery of galvanism? Yet these sciences, which may be studied in silent retreats, were more likely to yield fruit to the discoverer than aerostatics, which demand courage and skill, and of which the experiments, which are always public, are attended with great cost."

Robertson's proposed machine was to be 150 feet in