Chapter 1. Balloon Voyages
_ CHAPTER ONE. BALLOON VOYAGES
TREATS OF EARLY EFFORTS TO FLY, ETCETERA.
It is man‘s nature to soar intellectually, and it seems to have been his ambition from earliest ages to soar physically.
Every one in health knows, or at some period of life must have known, that upward bounding of the spirit which induces a longing for the possession of wings, that the material body might be wafted upwards into those blue realms of light, which are so attractive to the eye and imagination of poor creeping man that he has appropriately styled them the heavens.
Man has envied the birds since the world began. Who has not watched, with something more than admiration, the easy gyrations of the sea-mew, and listened, with something more than delight, to the song of the soaring lark?
To fly with the body as well as with the mind, is a wish so universal that the benignant Creator Himself seems to recognise it in that most attractive passage in Holy Writ, wherei

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