Page:Wonderful Balloon Ascents, 1870.djvu/30

12 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. . 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. . 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 anything in this kind that can hinder its motion if the motive faculty be answerable thereunto. We see that a great ship swims as well as a small cork, and an eagle flies in the air as well as a little gnat. This engine may be contrived from the same principles by which Archytas made a wooden dove, and Regiomontanus a wooden eagle. I conceive it were no difficult matter (if a man had leisure) to show more particularly the means of composing it. The perfecting of such an invention would be of such excellent use that it were enough, not only to make a man famous but the age wherein he lives. For, besides the strange discoveries that it might occasion in this other world, it would be also of inconceivable advantage for travelling, above any other conveyance that is now in use. So that, notwithstanding all these seeming impossibilities, it is likely