Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880, page 1 by Various Authors
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stuff are our Arctic and African explorers made; the men who run the lightning-expresses have a touch of it; it crops out in steeple-climbers, cave-explorers, beast-tamers; it makes men assault cloud-piercing and ice-mantled mountain-peaks and launch their frail canoes for voyages down earth-riving cañons and across continent sundering oceans. Sometimes action is denied, and then it strikes in and makes poets--perhaps the most daring adventurers of all. It must be difficult for the beaters of iron and the barterers in swine to understand why such useless timber is allowed to cumber the great workhouse; but then we don't know exactly what the trilobites were good for, and the utilitarians may find comfort in the reflection that at the present rate the obnoxious family is likely to entirely disappear with the Palæozoic.
Aëronauts have been free and accepted members of this order of modern knights-errant, from hot-headed, ill-fated Pilâtre de Rozier down to Gaston Tissandier, the man who still edits La Nature in the lower strata of an ocean into the treacherous upper depths of which he has risen seven miles. Your true aëronaut is not an inventor of flying-machines, not much concerned about what is known as the "problem of aërial navigation." He is content to take the wings of the morning and be carried away to the uttermost parts of the earth. Problems he leaves to the scientists: he wooes the wilderness he cannot subdue. He is an explorer of unknown regions, a beauty-worshipper at a shrine whose pearly, sun-kissed portals open to him alone. People travel thousands of miles horizontally to rest their eyes on scenes infinitely less novel, beautiful and grand than one perpendicular mile of vantage would open to them, little matter whence taken.
Having accepted the wind for his pilot, our argonaut seeks no improvement upon his aërial raft. Like the bow and arrow, it long ago reached perfection, and, though he may cherish some choice and secret reci