I may mention, too, that I believe I have among my audience this evening Mr. De Lisle Hay, the author not only of that recent very graphic book “Brighter Britain,” but also of another, more cognate to our present topic, entitled “Three Hundred Years Hence,” now out of print, though published only three years ago.  In this latter work he has a chapter on “Our Conquest of the Air,” and imagines a lighter gas called by him “lucegene,” as also a bird-like human flight very much as I had conceived it forty-one years ago.  He tells me also that the best vehicle for flying might be an imitation of the sidelong action of a flat fish in water; but how far he has worked upon this idea I know not.  Possibly, if in the room, he may tell us after I release you.

It is most worthy of notice, that in the almost solitary Biblical instance of winged angels (see Isaiah vi. 2, and a corresponding passage in Ezekiel—­all other angelic ministers being represented as etherealised men) these are somewhat like birds in outline, though having more wings,—­with twain covering the head so as to cleave the air, with twain to cover the feet so as to be a sort of tail or rudder, while with twain they did fly:  even as Blake, and Raffaelle, and some other painters have depicted them.  I mentioned this once to Professor Owen, our great natural philosopher, in a talk I had with him on human flight, and he thought such seraphim very remarkable in the light of analogous comparative anatomy.

Ovid also in a passage before me advocates our imitation of birds if we would fly bodily:  in his “De Icari Casu,” he says (with omissions)—­

    “Naturamque novat:  nam ponit in ordine pennas
    A minima coeptas, longam breviore sequenti:  ... 
    Sic imitentur aves:  geminas libravit in alas
    Ipse suum corpus, motaque pependit in aura.”

Which, being interpreted, means this,—­

    “Nature he reproduces, ranging fine
    From least to longest feathery plumes aline,
    Thus imitating birds, that on the air
    With balanced wings are poised in lightness there.”

Whilst our noble Laureate in “Locksley Hall” goes in for aerial machines, “Argosies of magic sails,” and “airy navies grappling in the central blue.”

As to that essay of mine published in the first number of Ainsworth’s Magazine, August 1842, long before the Patent Aerial Company started their projects, and very much noticed at the time,—­Mr. Claude Hamilton ingrafted it in his work on Flying; the Duke of Argyll in a note before me commends this principle of copying nature as the true one; a Signor Ignazio of Milan in 1877 adopted almost exactly my Flying Man,—­which was for the lecture enlarged from Cruikshank’s etching of my own sketch:  an aerial flapping machine, a sort of flying wheelbarrow, was some twenty years ago exhibited at Kensington:  whilst in the Daily Telegraph for July 10, 1874, you will find recorded the untimely death of one M. de Groof, the Flying Man, who unhappily perished at Cremorne after a successful flight of 5000 feet.  All these are on record.