appreciate the extreme mobility of the atmosphere or the intensity of the force which wind exerts on surfaces opposed to its action. A child with a palm-leaf fan can drive a balloon in equilibrium about at will in an atmosphere entirely quiet, while the same balloon, under the impulse of a lively gale, will tear itself loose from the aggregated avoirdupois of all who can lay hands upon it, and wrench great branches from the forest giants over which it skims. Doubtless, to the disheartening influence of a practical knowledge of the real difficulties in the way of aërial navigation is due the fact that the great mass of those who have attempted it have been scientists without practice, or fools without either scientific training or experimental data.

However strongly, as devout utilitarians, we may feel it our duty to disapprove, officially, of a class so little necessary to the body politic, aëronauts are interesting talkers, being able, like Shakespeare's Moor, to speak of "most disastrous chances, of moving accidents by flood and field, of antres vast and deserts idle, rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven."

Among American aëronauts none possessed a larger fund of such thrilling incident or greater enthusiasm for his calling than he who recently paid that last penalty which ever hovers over its followers—the venerable John Wise. His autobiography, Through the Air, is a prose poem on the glories of Cloudland. The following extract from a private letter written by him in 1876, after an aëronautical career of forty years, comprising nearly five hundred ascensions, illustrates this enthusiasm and his views on the sanitary aspect of aëronautics: "I claim that the balloon is the best sanitarium within the grasp of enervated humanity. I can demonstrate its utility, by theory and by fact, for all chronic diseases and for the improvement of the mental and physical functions. Elevate a person ten or twelve thousand feet above the sea-level and his whole texture expands: a wrinkled, cadaverous person fills out as plump as a youth. Then the beauty and magnitude of the scenery within the scope of vision exalt the mental faculties, soul and body become exhilarated, the appetite is quickened and all the symptoms of convalescence ensue. Why, my dear friend, I am bound to ascribe my health and vigor at the age of over sixty-eight to my profession, and only for that do I persist in it. When I make up my mind to rust and die I will give up balloon-ascensions."

Since Mr. Wise was not of a nature to be easily reconciled to "rust and die," can we doubt that the great transit could have come to him at no kinder season than when it should seem but a brief pausing on his upward flight? Though it will never be known just how or when he met the end, we may be certain that he had walked hand in hand with Death too long to greatly dread the final embrace. May we not think of him now as feasting his spirit on the splendid visions of that Promised Land which, Moses-like, it was permitted him to see prefigured in its earthly type? Throughout his adventures, too generally known to require more than passing allusion, one sees the same passionate devotion to the grand and sublime in sight and sensation, the same calm disregard of danger, whether exploding his balloon at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet and coolly noting the "fearful moaning noise caused by the air rushing through the network and the gas escaping above," preparing to test a lifelong theory of a steady easterly current by attempting to make it the medium of crossing the Atlantic, or participating with La Mountain and others in a voyage which, begun at St. Louis at 6.30 P.M., July 1, 1859, met daybreak at Fort Wayne, extended over the length of Lake Erie, included a view of Niagara from the altitude of a mile, and finally, after skirmishing within thirty feet of the storm-tossed waves of Lake Ontario for fifty miles and ploughing a tornado-track through a dense forest, terminated in a treetop near Sackett's Harbor, Jefferson county, New York, at 2.20 P.M.—twelve hundred miles in nineteen hours and forty minutes! Puck's promise kept! the seven-league boots outdone!

JOHN WISE.

Upon his son, Charles E. Wise, and his grandson, John Wise, Jr., he bestowed his skill and engrafted his enthusiasm. The latter began his aëronautical career with his teens, and though not yet out of them has made over forty ascensions. One of these excursions, made in the autumn of 1875 from Waynesburg, Greene county, Pennsylvania, sufficiently demonstrates, if any demonstration is needed, that a boy's luck and pluck are equal to anything. It had been raining the proverbial pitchforks all day, and the hydrogen oozed into the gas-bag with even more than its accustomed sluggishness. The curiosity of a country crowd was not easily damped, however, and the basket was finally attached and Master Johnny stepped on board. The aërostat sensibly refused to consider the proposition for an ascension, although urged by the successive relinquishment of barometer, lunch, water-bottle, coat, drag-rope and grapnel. As a last resort, the entire lower third of the gas-bag, which was uninflated, was cut away, the valve-cord by accident sharing the same fate, leaving an opening about seventeen feet in diameter. Then, "the crowd having given us room, father asked me whether I felt timid about going. I told him I was determined to go if the balloon would take me. He said, 'Good-bye, Johnny:' I said, 'Good-bye,' and found myself shooting up into space on a cold, rainy October day, coatless, without ropes, anchor or valve-cord, the rags of the balloon fluttering in the breeze created by the sudden ascent; the multitude vociferously cheering me one moment and the next calling me to come back for God's sake! But I only replied by hurrahing and waving my hat, feeling perfectly cool, and rather enjoying the excitement of the vast crowd that was now fast disappearing below me. In seven minutes the earth vanished from my sight, and I passed from a driving rain below the clouds into a dense snowstorm above them. My feet and hands were almost numb with cold, and the prospect was about as cheerless as it well could be, when a thought passed through my brain that made me laugh outright. I had heard of people coming down in bursted balloons, but I was the first who had ever gone up in one. The idea appeared so ridiculous that it really made me feel warmer." Think of this aërial babe in the woods, with Nature's awful forces warring about him and the earth lost to view, laughing himself warm over a joke at the expense of his terrible situation! Truly, "he jests at scars that never felt a wound." Perhaps it was the balloon, but I believe it could only have been his good angel, that brought the boy safely down into a small cleared space in a forest thirty-eight minutes and forty miles from the point of departure.

WASHINGTON H. DONALDSON.

Another of Master John's voyages curiously illustrates the different directions of coexistent currents. On July 4, 1878, he made an ascension from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, landing ten miles south of the city, while J.M. Johnston, of the Lancaster Intelligencer, who ascended in another balloon at the same moment, came down at a point equally distant in an exactly opposite direction from the city.

With the name of John Wise that of another aëronaut equally well known is associated—not alone by their joint attempt to cross the Atlantic by