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 STUDIES IN CULTURE HISTORY 
 
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL SERIES 
 
 FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY 
 
 VOLUME XVIII 
 
 1928-1931 
 
 CHICAGO, U. S. A. 
 
 fl 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. The Prehistory of Aviation 1 
 
 By Berthold Laufer. 
 
 2. Geophagy 97 
 
 By Berthold Laufer. 
 
 3. The Domestication of the Cormorant in China and Japan . . 199 
 
 By Berthold Laufer. 
 
Field Museum of Natural History 
 
 Founded by Marshall Field, 1893 
 
 Publication 253 
 Anthropological Series Volume XVIII, No. 1 
 
 THE PREHISTORY OF AVIATION 
 
 BY 
 
 Berthold Laufer 
 
 Curator of Anthropology 
 
 12 Plates in Photogravure 
 
 TEE LI8SARY 8F TBE 
 0-C 2 01928 
 
 UNIVERSITY or ILLINOIS 
 
 Chicago 
 
 1928 
 
Copyright 1928 
 
 BY 
 
 Field Museum of Natural History 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 BY FIELD MUSEUM PRESS 
 
S72.D5" 
 
 PA 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 List of Plates 5 
 
 Introduction 7 
 
 The Romance of Flying in Ancient China 14 
 
 Kites as Precursors of Aeroplanes 31 
 
 The Dawn of Airships in Ancient India 44 
 
 From Babylon and Persia to the Greeks and the Arabs 58 
 
 The Air Mail of Ancient Times 71 
 
 Notes 88 
 
 Bibliographical References 94 
 
 Index 95 
 
 
LIST OF PLATES 
 
 I. Winged Deity Attended by Bird-men. Stone bas-relief of Han period, 
 A.D. 147, Shan-tung, China. 
 
 II. Aerial Contest of Dragon-chariot and Dragon-riders. Stone bas-relief of 
 Han period, A.D. 147, Shan-tung, China. 
 
 III. Aerial Contest of Dragon-chariot and Dragon-riders. Continuation of the 
 
 panel shown in Plate II. 
 
 IV. Ki-kung's Flying Chariot. Chinese Woodcut from T'u shu tsi ch'eng. 
 
 V. Francesco Lana's Flying Boat. From Lana's Prodromo, 1670. 
 
 VI. Flying Taoist Saint. Chinese landscape in ink from General Munthe Col- 
 lection now in Los Angeles Museum. 
 
 VII. The Goddess Si Wang Mu Flying Astride a Crane. Scene from an embroi- 
 dered Chinese screen of the K'ang-hi period (1662-1722) in Blackstone 
 Chinese Collection of Field Museum. 
 
 VIII. Boys Flying a Kite. Scene from a Chinese painted roll by Su Han-ch'en of 
 the twelfth century in collections of Field Museum. 
 
 IX. Earliest English Illustration of a Kite. From John Bate's The Mysteries 
 of Nature and Art, 1634. 
 
 X. Two Apsarases or Heavenly Nymphs Flying downward and Surrounding 
 the Buddha Amitabha. Marble sculpture with votive inscription 
 yielding date A.D. 677. Blackstone Chinese Collection of Field 
 Museum. 
 
 XI. Kai Kawus' Flight to Heaven. From a Persian illustrated manuscript of 
 the Shahnameh, dated 1587-88. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of 
 Art, New York. 
 
 XII. The Aerial Voyage of Domingo Gonsales. From F. Godwin's Man in the 
 Moone, 1638. 
 
THE PREHISTORY OF AVIATION 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 A French miniature of the fourteenth century depicts the Spirit 
 
 or Angel of Youth, who is never fatigued and whose course nothing 
 
 can arrest. He is arrayed with wings on his feet, soaring over the sea. 
 
 The wings are tinted green, the color of hope. Youth has fair hair 
 
 and a blue robe. He carries on his shoulders a pilgrim who is in the 
 
 vigor of age, and while crossing the water, addresses to him these 
 
 lines: — 
 
 I am called Youth, the nimble, 
 
 The tumbler and the runner, 
 
 The grasshopper, the dasher, 
 
 Who cares not a glove for danger. 
 
 I see, I come, I bound, I fly, 
 
 I sport and caracole. 
 
 My feet they bear me whither I will, 
 
 They've wings; your eyes may see them. 
 
 Give here thine hand, with thee I'll fly 
 
 And carry thee over the sea. 
 
 On May 20-21, 1927, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh accomplished 
 his solitary transoceanic flight from New York to Paris and stirred 
 the entire world. We experienced the same thrill as in our boyhood 
 days when we were first reading about the campaigns of Alexander 
 the Great or Columbus' voyages of discovery. 
 
 Yet, the desire to fly is as old as mankind. "Oh that I had wings 
 like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest," sings the 
 
8 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 royal psalmist (Psalms 55, 6). In all ages man's imagination was 
 fired by the sight of soaring birds and was seized by the ambition to 
 migrate and to sail upon the wind like one of them. Many daring 
 men tried nobly and less nobly to emulate the ways of the eagle in 
 the air. It is a long record of ventures, experiments, and failures, 
 but remains the most fascinating romance in the history of mankind. 
 
 In his excellent "History of Aeronautics in Great Britain," J. E. 
 Hodgson divides the history of the subject into four eras covering 
 very unequal periods of time. His first he titles the legendary and 
 prehistoric era with its tale of mythological and fabulous stories of 
 flight, verging gradually into the historic, and extending to about 
 the end of the fifteenth century. As examples of this prehistoric 
 period he cites Daedalus and Icarus from Greek mythology and 
 Bladud, the flying king of Britain in 800 B.C. However, China, 
 India, and the rest of Asia remain out of consideration in this scheme. 
 Moreover, the ideas registered by Hodgson under his three historical 
 periods of Europe, like aspiration, speculation, endeavor, romance, 
 limited achievement, are no less conspicuous in the Orient. His 
 second or first historical period in Europe, which dates from the six- 
 teenth to beyond the latter half of the eighteenth century, is charac- 
 terized thus: "The practicability of flight was a matter of speculation 
 and discussion, became the subject of imaginative romance, and was 
 made the object of theoretical projects and not a few practical 
 attempts." 
 
 It will be demonstrated on the following pages that all these 
 features were in evidence among Oriental nations in early times, 
 many centuries before their dawn in Europe, and that the fundamen- 
 tal ideas underlying the principles of our present aviation take their 
 root in the Orient. My conception of the so-called mythological and 
 legendary period in the history of aviation differs widely from that 
 of my predecessors. It is a comfortable method and no more than a 
 conventional form of thinking to stamp early traditions as mytho- 
 logical or legendary. This is a scholastic phrase from which little is 
 gained, no tangible significance accrues. An inquisitive mind is 
 intent on unravelling the fabric of a myth, on seeking an interpreta- 
 tion of its origin. If myth it is, how did the myth spring into exist- 
 ence? As there is a logic of human reasoning, so there is a logic of 
 human imagination. The imaginative faculty of the human mind 
 cannot conceive things that have absolutely no reality in existence; 
 the product of our imagination is always elicited by something that 
 exists or that we have reason to believe to exist. 
 
Introduction 9 
 
 H. G. Wells, who, being a novelist and artist, is possessed of the 
 insight, vision, and intuition which most scholars lack, is on the right 
 track when in his "Outline of History" he comments on the Daedalus 
 story as follows: "Greek legend has it that it was in Crete that Daeda- 
 lus attempted to make the first flying-machine. Daedalus ('cunning 
 artificer') was a sort of personified summary of mechanical skill. It is 
 curious to speculate what germ of fact lies behind him and those 
 waxen wings that, according to the legend, melted and plunged his 
 son Icarus in the sea." In his manner of reasoning Wells certainly 
 is superior to the majority of schoolmasters who pitifully dismiss 
 Daedalus as a myth. 
 
 The prehistory of mechanical science is shrouded in mystery, 
 because primitive man was unable to render an intelligent account 
 of it. In the same manner as natural phenomena were regarded by 
 him as wonders or miracles wrought by supernatural agencies, so any 
 mechanical devices were interpreted as the outcome of witchcraft: 
 the skilled artificer and every investigator and experimenter of pre- 
 historic and early historic days has gone down in history or tradition 
 as a sorcerer, enchanter, wizard, or magician, who made a pact with 
 demoniacal powers. Many of these so-called magicians were simply 
 clever mechanics whose work was beyond their contemporaries' com- 
 prehension or whose achievements were so singular and awe-inspiring 
 that supernatural forces were believed to have inspired their genius. 
 This is the reason why those who made attempts at aerial flights are 
 usually associated with magic and necromantic art or why in our 
 middle ages solely devils and witches are endowed with the faculty 
 of flying. John Wilkins, in 1648, wrote seriously, "Witches are com- 
 monly related to passe unto their usual meetings in some remote 
 place; and as they doe sell windes unto mariners, so likewise are they 
 sometimes hired to carry men speedily through the open air. Acosta 
 affirms that such kind of passages are usuall amongst divers sorcerers 
 with Indians at this day. So Kepler in his Astronomicall dream doth 
 fancy a witch to be conveyed to the moon by her Familian." 
 
 The ancient traditions regarding mechanical wonders must there- 
 fore be divested of their legendary garb and exposed in their historical 
 nucleus. On the other hand, it is always the marvelous and romantic 
 that lingers in the memory of man. The dry and bare bones of his- 
 torical events are apt to be relegated to the wastebasket of oblivion. 
 We do not retain in our minds the dates of wars and battles or the 
 chronological tables of dynasties we had to memorize in school, but 
 we remember many heroes by anecdotes and bons mots which the 
 
10 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 stern historian will frown at as unauthentic. No historian's pen has 
 preserved a record of the Trojan War, but Homer has sung it in the 
 form of epic poetry which has been enjoyed by a hundred generations 
 and which has been more often read than any accurate report of a 
 war published by the competent staff of any war ministry. Alex- 
 ander the Great is not remembered by Oriental nations as their con- 
 queror, but as a deified hero of marvelous exploits, as he appears in 
 the Greek Romance going under his name. Therefore it is just man's 
 ingrained love for the fabulous and fanciful, for the wondrous and 
 extraordinary to which we are indebted for the preservation of 
 ancient records of flight. 
 
 In the same manner as astrology was the precursor of astronomy 
 and alchemy evolved into the science of chemistry, so there is an 
 abundance of primitive lore which godfathers the history of aviation. 
 To distinguish that primeval stage from aviation as an accomplished 
 fact of the present time, we might coin for the former the new term 
 "aviology" in imitation of astrology, but the public mind is suffi- 
 ciently alarmed by an exuberance of ologies, and it is therefore pre- 
 ferable to speak simply of the prehistory of aviation. It must not be 
 imagined that the latter is set apart as a thing in itself, fundamentally 
 distinct from the history of aviation. The two, in fact, are closely 
 allied and interwoven, inseparable, merging into each other, and the 
 recent historical development is unintelligible without a knowledge 
 of its prehistoric setting and background. Thus, it will be seen, our 
 aeroplanes are pedigreed from kites which have their origin in China. 
 Our modern progress in aviation is not solely due to efforts of the 
 present generation, stupendous and admirable as they may be, but 
 presents the process of a gradual evolution of ideas which have grown 
 out of the imagination, endeavors, experiments, triumphs, and 
 failures of many past ages. Stress must be laid on the word "imagi- 
 nation," for there is no field of human exertions in which imagination 
 and romantic dreams have played a greater role and have proved 
 more fertile than in the development of aviation. Intuition, romance, 
 and adventure are its leading motives; for man, from the very mo- 
 ment he had grown into a full-fledged human being, never lived on 
 bread and love alone. We have conquered the air in this age of 
 science and unprecedented progress of mechanics, but in the last 
 instance this conquest goes back to the trend of man's mind toward 
 the romantic and adventurous. Describing merely the gradual per- 
 fection of mechanical devices does not make a complete history of 
 aviation. It is the spirit and the idea behind the devices that count, 
 
Introduction 11 
 
 the idea itself means everything. The will to fly is the will to conquer, 
 and this will has pervaded the hearts of men in the earliest stages of 
 the great civilizations of Asia. 
 
 Many visions and reveries of the Orient have been brought true 
 by modern inventions, but the Orient merits credit for the genesis of 
 the idea. The notion of Roentgen rays, for instance, was anticipated 
 both in ancient China and India. The Chinese have several accounts 
 concerning metal mirrors which would light up the interior organs of 
 the human body. The emperor Ts'in Shi (259-210 B.C.) is credited 
 with the possession of such a mirror which was styled "the precious 
 mirror that would illuminate the bones of the body," or "the mirror 
 illuminating the gall." This mirror was discovered in the palace of 
 the Ts'in emperors at Hien-yang in Shen-si Province by the founder 
 of the Han dynasty in 206 B.C., and is described as follows: "It was 
 a rectangular mirror four feet wide, five feet and nine inches high, 
 brilliant both on its outer and inner sides. When a man stood straight 
 before it to see his reflection, his image appeared reversed. When 
 some one placed his hands on his heart, he observed his five viscera 
 placed side by side and not impeded by any obstacle. When a man 
 had a hidden malady within his organs, he could recognize the seat 
 of his complaint by looking into this mirror and laying his hands on 
 his heart. Moreover, when a woman had perverse sentiments, her 
 gall would swell and her heart palpitate. The emperor Ts'in Shi 
 therefore constantly availed himself of this mirror to test the 
 women of his seraglio: those whose gall would swell and whose 
 heart would be agitated, he ordered to be killed." 
 
 Jivaka, a celebrated physician of ancient India and contemporary 
 of Gautama Buddha, called the king of doctors, at least had the idea 
 that it was necessary to illuminate the organs of the body for the 
 purpose of making a diagnosis and perform surgical operations. He 
 practised trephining, and this appeared to his contemporaries so 
 wondrous that it was interwoven with many legends. Jivaka is 
 said to have discovered in a load of fagots a marvelous gem possessed 
 of the virtue that "when placed before an invalid, it illuminated his 
 body as a lamp lights up all objects in a house, and so revealed the 
 nature of his malady." He laid this gem on the head of a sick man, 
 and found that there was a centipede inside of his head (probably a 
 brain tumor) ; he opened his skull with an instrument and pulled the 
 centipede out with a pair of heated pincers, whereupon the patient 
 recovered. According to another version, it was a piece of wood 
 from a tree, called "the king of physicians," which enabled Jivaka 
 
12 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 to see plainly the five viscera, the intestines, and the stomach; and 
 he availed himself of a golden knife in opening the skull. 
 
 True it is that the first actual bombardments from the air took 
 place but recently during the World War, but the idea itself is not 
 novel. It was forestalled in the seventeenth century by Francesco 
 Lana (below, p. 22), and the first air-bombardier was the giant bird 
 Rukh when he hurled huge bowlders at Sindbad's ship. 
 
 The story of a flying Uganda warrior who engaged in efficient 
 bombardments from the air was graphically recorded in 1871 by the 
 famous explorer, Henry M. Stanley, in his work "Through the Dark 
 Continent" : — 
 
 "One of the heroes of Nakivingi [one of the ancient kings of 
 Uganda, — the Charlemagne of Uganda, as Stanley calls him] was a 
 warrior named Kibaga, who possessed the power of flying. When the 
 king warred with the Wanyoro, he sent Kibaga into the air to ascer- 
 tain the whereabouts of the foe, who, when discovered by this extra- 
 ordinary being, were attacked on land in their hiding-places by 
 Nakivingi, and from above by the active and faithful Kibaga, who 
 showered great rocks on them and by these means slew a vast number. 
 It happened that among the captives of Unyoro Kibaga saw a 
 beautiful woman, who was solicited by the king in marriage. As 
 Nakivingi was greatly indebted to Kibaga for his unique services, 
 he gave her to Kibaga as wife, with a warning, however, not to 
 impart the knowledge of his power to her, lest she should betray him. 
 For a long time after the marriage his wife knew nothing of his power, 
 but suspecting something strange in him from his repeated sudden 
 absences and reappearances at his home, she set herself to watch him, 
 and one morning as he left his hut, she was surprised to see him sud- 
 denly mount into the air with a burden of rocks slung on his back. 
 On seeing this she remembered that Wanyoro complaining that 
 more of their people were killed by some means from above than by 
 the spears of Nakivingi, and Delilah-like, loving her race and her 
 people more than she loved her husband, she hastened to her people's 
 camp, and communicated, to the surprise of the Wanyoro, what she 
 had that day learned. To avenge themselves on Kibaga, the Wanyoro 
 set archers in ambush on the summits of each lofty hill, with instruc- 
 tions to confine themselves to watching the air and listening for the 
 brushing of his wings, and to shoot their arrows in the direction of 
 the sound, whether anything was seen or not. By this means on a 
 certain day, as Nakivingi marched to the battle, Kibaga was wound- 
 ed to the death by an arrow, and upon the road large drops of blood 
 
Introduction 13 
 
 were seen falling, and on coming to a tall tree the king detected a 
 dead body entangled in its branches. When the tree was cut down, 
 Nakivingi saw to his infinite sorrow that it was the body of his 
 faithful flying warrior Kibaga." 
 
 If this tradition had been recorded in recent years, we should be 
 inclined to trace it to the influence of World-War stories spreading 
 to Africa, but it was recorded by Stanley in 1871 when there were 
 no Zeppelins and aeroplanes in sight. 
 
 In the seventeenth century Joseph Glanvill predicted that to 
 future ages it might become "as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to 
 fly into remotest regions, as it then was to buy a pair of boots." 
 
 John Logan, a Scotch poet of the eighteenth century, has the 
 
 lines: — 
 
 Oh could I fly, I'd fly with thee! 
 
 We'd make with joyful wing 
 Our annual visit o'er the globe, 
 
 Companions of the spring. 
 
 Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), grandfather of Charles Darwin, 
 in his The Botanic Garden (1789), utters the prophetic words: — 
 
 Soon shall thy arm, unconquer'd steam! afar 
 Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; 
 Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear 
 The flying chariot through the field of air. 
 
 In 1907 Dr. Alexander Graham Be\\ wrote, "It has long been 
 recognized by a growing school of thinners that an aerial vehicle, in 
 order to cope with the wind, should be specifically heavier than the 
 air through which it moves. This position is supported by the fact 
 that all of nature's flying models, from the smallest insect to the 
 largest bird, are specifically heavier than air in which they fly, most 
 of them many hundreds of times heavier, and that none of them adopts 
 the balloon principle in flight ... It is certainly the case that the 
 tendency of aerial research is to-day reverting more and more to the 
 old lines of investigation that were pursued for hundreds of years 
 before the invention of the balloon diverted attention from the sub- 
 ject. The old devices have been re-invented; the old experiments 
 have been tried once more. Again, the birds are recognized as the 
 true models of flight, and again men have put on wings, but this 
 time with more promise of success." 
 
THE ROMANCE OF FLYING IN ANCIENT CHINA 
 
 Among the many singular coincidences of events that loom up in 
 ancient books of the East and the West, none perhaps is more capti- 
 vating than that an imperial flyer appears at the threshold of the 
 earliest recorded history of China and that a royal flyer opens the 
 chapter of the early history of Great Britain. 
 
 Bladud, the legendary tenth king of Britain, father of King Lear 
 and founder of Bath, is said to have made wings of feathers by means 
 of which he attempted an aerial flight that unfortunately resulted in 
 his death in 852 before our era. This story is recorded by Geoffrey of 
 Monmouth (A.D. 1100-54) in his Historia Regum Britanniae, written 
 in or about the year 1147 (first printed in 1508). Naturally, Bladud 
 is made by tradition a necromancer and performer of magical tricks, 
 in the same manner as attempts at flying were connected with magic 
 in China and elsewhere. 
 
 The Chinese emperor Shun, who lived in the third millennium 
 before our era (traditional date 2258-2208 B.C.), is not only the first 
 flyer recorded in history, but also the very first who made a 
 successful descent in a parachute, — an experiment first made or re- 
 peated in the midst of our civilization as late as A.D. 1783. 
 
 Shun's early life teemed with thrilling adventures. His mother 
 died when he was quite young. His father, Ku Sou, himself of im- 
 perial descent, took a second wife by whom he had a son. He grew 
 very fond of his offspring from this new union, but gradually con- 
 ceived a dislike for Shun, which resulted in several conspiracies 
 against the poor youngster's life. In each case, however, he was 
 miraculously rescued, and in spite of severe persecution continued in 
 exemplary and dutiful conduct toward his father and stepmother. 
 By his filial piety he attracted the attention of the wise and worthy 
 emperor Yao whose name is suggestive of China's golden age. Yao 
 had two gifted daughters, Nu Ying and O Huang, who instructed 
 Shun in the "art of flying like a bird." In the commentary to the 
 Annals of the Bamboo Books (that is, records inscribed on tablets of 
 bamboo), an authentic ancient historical book, Shun is indeed de- 
 scribed as a flyer. There it is written, "Shun's parents detested him. 
 They made him plaster a granary and set fire to it at its foundation. 
 Shun donned the work-clothes of a bird, and flying made his escape." 
 Then his parents caused him to descend a deep well and heaped stones 
 on top of it. Shun donned the work-clothes of a dragon and crawled 
 
 14 
 
The Romance of Flying in Ancient China 15 
 
 out of the well from the side. He was endowed with a dragon's 
 countenance and thus shared the dragon's natural ability to fly and 
 to crawl. Shun was not a notoriety seeker; he did not fly for the sake 
 of glory or establishing a record; he flew because sheer necessity 
 compelled him to fly to save his soul. For this purpose he availed 
 himself of a flying apparatus based on the principle of bird-flight. 
 
 But this is not all. Se-ma Ts'ien, the father of history, as he is 
 justly called, has preserved the following tradition. Ku Sou bade his 
 son Shun build a granary and ascend it, and thereupon set the struc- 
 ture on fire. Shun, who stood on top of the tower, spread out two 
 large reed hats which he used as a parachute in making his descent, 
 and landed on the ground unscathed. Considering the fact that 
 Chinese reed hats are umbrella-shaped, circular, and very large in 
 diameter (some such hats in the Museum's collection from Korea 
 measure two feet three inches to three feet in diameter), this feat 
 would not seem impossible. In the use of the parachute the Chinese 
 have forestalled us a considerable span of time; for Leonardo da 
 Vinci (1452-1519), the great artist, scientist, and mechanician, was 
 the first in our midst who conceived the idea of the parachute. 
 Leonardo writes, "If a man have a tent roof of calked linen twelve 
 yards broad and as many yards high, he will be able to let himself 
 fall from any great height without danger to himself." In one of his 
 manuscripts he has also given the figure of a man descending with 
 this kind of parachute. About 1595 Fausto Veranzio, a Venetian, 
 published a modified design, doubtless inspired by Leonardo's sketch, 
 in which a sort of square sail extended by four rods of equal size is 
 used. There is, however, one great difference between Leonardo and 
 Shun: the former was merely a theorist who never used a parachute, 
 while the latter really performed the trick. The first real descent in a 
 parachute in Europe was not made till 1783 when Lenormand carried 
 out a successful experiment from an observatory at Montpellier. 
 
 To complete Shun's story, — he married the two sisters, his teach- 
 ers in the art of flying; and Yao, his father-in-law, gave him a share 
 in the government of the empire. On the latter's death he succeeded 
 to the throne and ruled as the model of a good and wise sovereign. 
 
 Chinese writers fable about a country of Flying Folks (Yii min) K 
 located in an island in the south-eastern ocean, living on high peaks 
 near the sea-shore, and described as people with long jaws, bird's- 
 beaks, red eyes, white heads, covered with hair and feathers, able to 
 fly, but not over a long distance; they are said to resemble human 
 beings, but to be born from eggs. The conception of bird-men is 
 
16 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 quite familiar to ancient Chinese mythology. A deity with outspread 
 wings, seated on a pedestal, is shown on the pediment of a grave- 
 stone of the Han period (Plate I), from about the middle of the 
 second century of our era. Winged attendants fly above him, and 
 others approach him, holding gifts or offerings. On the left are two 
 kneeling figures, holding tablets in the attitude of adoration, the 
 first with a horse's-head, the second with a bird's-head, both winged, 
 but for the rest human and clad in wide, long gowns. Behind this 
 pair appears a walking bird with long tail-feathers, but with human 
 head, holding the leaf of a plant. This picture represents the abode of 
 the aerial spirits. In Assyrian-Babylonian monuments winged figures, 
 man-headed or bird-headed, are frequent, but they are always repre- 
 sented standing or walking, never flying, which makes for a net 
 distinction from the Chinese flying bird-men. As in the sculptures of 
 Mesopotamia winged bulls, lions, griffins, and horses appear, so we 
 meet also in China statues and relief representations of winged mon- 
 sters, tigers, lions, and horses. 
 
 Lei Kung, god of thunder and lightning, has wings attached to his 
 shoulders, usually wings of a bat, and by means of these appendages 
 he directs his course through the air to wherever he desires to produce 
 a thunder-storm. ■ 
 
 Tung Yung, a legendary personage, who is supposed to have lived 
 in the second century of our era, was rewarded for his filial piety by 
 the Spinning Damsel, an astral deity, from whom he received two 
 boys whom she had deposed under an elm-tree. One of these had 
 under his arm-pits fleshy excrescences in the shape of wings, and his 
 face displayed a bird's-beak. When grown up, he excelled in muscular 
 strength and supported his father and younger brother with the fruit 
 of his manual labor. His employer complained of his insatiable 
 appetite, but was pleased, as he performed the work of two men. 
 One day the bird-man announced that his mother had appeared to 
 him the previous night, inviting them to rejoin her; then he unfolded 
 his wings, shouldered his father, and sailed up skyward. 
 
 "Ascending to heaven by means of flight" is expressed in Chinese 
 "by means of feathers he was transformed and ascended as an im- 
 mortal"; and "feather scholar" or "feather guest" is a term for a 
 Taoist priest. 
 
 Winged flight, however, appears but seldom as a real attempt. 
 The emperor Shun is practically the sole example, and seems to have 
 found few imitators, quite in distinction from Daedalus, whose feat 
 
The Romance of Flying in Ancient China 17 
 
 has stimulated so many until recent times. Another instance of 
 winged flight known to me is one that occurs in a dream. 
 
 T'ao K'an, a celebrated Chinese statesman (A.D. 209-334), once 
 had a dream which led to his advancement. He dreamt that he 
 scaled the heights of heaven with the aid of eight wings, and passed 
 through eight of the celestial doors, but was driven back from the 
 ninth by the warder, who cast him down to earth. When he landed 
 there, the wings on his left side were broken. Subsequently he en- 
 tered public life, and was appointed governor of eight provinces, 
 which was interpreted as a realization of his dream. 
 
 The first description of an air-journey is found in the celebrated 
 poem Li Sao ("Fallen into Sorrow") by K'ii Yuan (332-295 B.C.), a 
 loyal statesman, who enjoyed the confidence of his sovereign until 
 impeached through the intrigues of rivals. Despondent over his dis- 
 grace and concious of his own integrity, he found solace in composing 
 a poem, which is an allegorical picture of his search after a prince who 
 would listen to good counsels in government. The poet kneels at the 
 grave of the emporer Shun, and is then carried up into the air in a 
 chariot built in the form of a phoenix to which are yoked four dragons 
 smooth as jade. In this vehicle, through dust and wind, he suddenly 
 ascends on high toward the K'un-lun range of mountains. Wang-shu, 
 the charioteer of the moon, is his precursor, and Fei-lien, god of winds, 
 follows him as attendant. 
 
 I ordered the phoenix to fly aloft, 
 
 And continue its flight day and night. , 
 
 But a whirlwind brought together my opponents, — 
 
 Clouds and rainbow were led to meet and oppose me. 
 
 In multitudes they assembled, now dividing, now collecting. 
 
 In confusion they separated, some going above, others beneath. 
 
 In his search he surveys the earth to its four extreme points, travels 
 all over the sky, and then descends to the earth. Again he undertakes 
 a journey into the air above the Kun-lun Mountains, in a chariot 
 adorned with jade and ivory drawn by a team of eight flying dragons. 
 
 I turned my course to K'un-lun; 
 
 Long was the way, and far and wide did I wander, 
 
 Amidst the dark shade were displayed the rainbows in the clouds, 
 
 While the jade bells about the chariot tinkled. 
 
 I started in the morning from the Ford of the Sky, 
 
 And in the evening I arrived at the extreme west. 
 
 The idea of a flying chariot or airship, usually drawn by dragons, 
 is not alien to ancient Chinese art. An aerial contest of winged beings 
 
18 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 astride scaly and horned dragons (Plates II-III) is skilfully repre- 
 sented on a grave-stone of the Han period (second century A.D.). 
 This picture is animated by life and motion: an exalted winged god is 
 enthroned in a flying chariot set in motion by fleet dragons and float- 
 ing over clouds. The pilot of the airship is leaning forward, tapping 
 a dragon's tail as though eager to spur him on. Two winged standard- 
 bearers mounted on swiftly moving dragons follow the car as escorts. 
 Four dragon-riders precede it, and the procession moves on toward 
 a winged flag-bearer standing on a cloud, while another person kneels 
 in front of him. The clouds are represented as birds on the wing, 
 their bodies consisting of spirals which are symbolic of clouds. 
 
 Huang Ti, one of the ancient legendary emperors, attained im- 
 mortality by mounting a fantastic creature with the body of a horse 
 and wings of a dragon (called tse-huang or ch'eng-huang). According 
 to another version of the legend, he made his ascent on a long-bearded 
 dragon strong enough to transport also his wives and ministers, — 
 more than seventy persons. The officials of lower rank who were not 
 able to find a seat on the dragon's back (not unlike the strap-hangers 
 in our street-cars) clung to the hairs of the dragon's beard; these, 
 however, gave way, the passengers plunged to the ground and also 
 dropped the emperor's bow. The multitude of spectators reveren- 
 tially watched the apotheosis from a distance, and when Huang Ti had 
 reached his destination in heaven, they picked up his bow and the 
 dragon's hairs. This story is a cheery example of the Chinese sense of 
 humor: other myth-framers would have been prone to push their 
 principles to extremes and, endowing the dragon's beard with divine 
 strength, would have conveyed the strap-hangers straight heaven- 
 ward. 
 
 Under the reign of the emperor Ts'in Shi (259-210 B.C.), Mao 
 Mong, great grandfather of Mao Ying, styled "the true man of sub- 
 lime origin," ascended Mount Hua, mounted the clouds and bestrode 
 a dragon which was hidden in the clouds, rising into the azure spaces 
 of heaven in broad daylight. 
 
 In a hymn to the god of Heaven composed under the emperor Wu 
 (140-87 B.C.) of the Han dynasty, the deity appears amid dark 
 clouds in a chariot drawn by winged flying dragons and adorned with 
 many feathered streamers; the rapidity with which the deity descends 
 is compared with that of the horses of the wind. 
 
 Pei Ti, god (literally, "emperor") of the north, much worshipped 
 at Canton under the name Pak Tai, was after a long career of holiness 
 elected to the office of chief minister of the gods. Angelic messengers 
 
The Romance of Flying in Ancient China 19 
 
 descended from heaven, presenting him with silk robes, red shoes, 
 flying swords, and a chariot of nine colors in which he ascended to the 
 celestial abode at the time of the reign of Huang Ti. 
 
 When the mind of a nation is filled with the romance of the air, 
 when the air surrounding it is populated with winged genii and flying 
 chariots, and when such subjects are glorified by art and adorn the 
 stone walls of the grave chambers, it is the logical step that imagina- 
 tion thus impregnated leads one or the other to attempt the construc- 
 tion of some kind of an airship. 
 
 The Ti wang shi ki ("History of the Ancient Emperors"), written 
 by Huang-fu Mi (A.D. 215-282), contains this notice: — 
 
 "Ki-kung-shi was able to make a flying chariot which driven by a 
 fair wind travelled a great distance. At the time of the emperor 
 Ch'eng T'ang (1766-54 B.C., founder of the Shang dynasty) the west 
 wind blew Ki-kung's chariot as far as Yu-chou (Ho-nan). The em- 
 peror ordered this chariot to be destroyed that it should not become 
 known to the people. Ten years later when the east wind blew, the 
 emperor caused another chariot of this kind to be built by Ki-kung 
 and sent him back in it." 
 
 The term "flying chariot" (fei ch'o) used in this passage is now 
 current in China for the designation of an aeroplane. 
 
 A similar account is contained in the Po wu chi, written by Chang 
 Hua in the third century of our era, but with the difference that the 
 invention of the flying chariot is ascribed to the Ki-kung nation. 
 A tribe of this name is mentioned in the Shan hai king ("Book of 
 Mountains and Seas"), an ancient collection of (partially absurd) 
 geographical fables, where the Ki-kung are characterized as single- 
 armed (the very name means "one upper arm"), three-eyed, herma- 
 phrodites, and riding on striped horses. Shen Yo (A.D. 411-513), the 
 commentator of the Bamboo Annals, speaks of the Ki-kung or their 
 chief as having arrived in a chariot at the court of the emperor Ch'eng 
 T'ang in 1766 B.C., but he says nothing of a flying chariot, nor does 
 the Shan hai Jang, which attributes to them horses as means of con- 
 veyance. At the outset it is hardly probable that single-armed herma- 
 phrodites should have a special talent for aviation. It is therefore 
 obvious that in the above notice of the Po wu chi two distinct tradi- 
 tions are contaminated : there was, in my opinion, an individual who 
 lived in times of antiquity, Ki-kung by name, who invented an airship 
 or endeavored at least to construct one; and there was also a tradition 
 current about a fabulous tribe accidentally bearing the same name, 
 which had nothing to do with aviation; because, however, the Ki- 
 
20 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 kung people arrived at the imperial court in chariots, it was easy to 
 confound or identify these chariots with the flying chariot made by 
 the mechanic, Ki-kung by name. On the other hand, it is suspicious 
 that the latter also is supposed to have come to the court of Ch'eng 
 T'ang, and this date is surely the outcome of an afterthought and 
 devoid of historical value. Be this as it may, the interesting point to 
 be retained is that the Chinese possess an apparently old tradition 
 regarding an airship driven by the force of the winds. 
 
 A wood engraving of what in the estimation of Chinese draughts- 
 men this airship looked like is on record and reproduced in Plate IV. 
 Here we see two men standing in a square, box-like affair, with flags 
 flying, comfortably sailing in the clouds; the car is set in motion by 
 two curious wheels. It will be noted that the two men are just human, 
 having two eyes and two arms; and it should be borne in mind that 
 this illustration is not contemporaneous with the story, nor is it 
 handed down from ancient times, but that it is of comparatively 
 recent origin and merely reconstructed upon the slender fabric of the 
 ancient tradition. It has as much value for the reconstruction of the 
 airship in question as, for instance, Dora's illustrations of the Bible 
 have for the reconstruction of ancient Hebrew life and archaeology. 
 Professor Giles, who first called attention to this drawing in his 
 article "Traces of Aviation in Ancient China," has also published an 
 earlier woodcut of the same subject, taken from a rare book in the 
 Cambridge University Library, that was published in China in the 
 latter part of the fourteenth century; the Ki-kung car illustrated in 
 this book, aside from minor details, is practically identical with the 
 later production aforementioned. Professor Giles adds this inter- 
 esting comment: "It is noticeable at once that the occupants of the 
 car, especially in the later illustration, are not one-armed. Also, that 
 the wheels fore and aft are at right angles to the direction in which 
 the car is flying through rolling clouds; and further, what is most 
 curious of all, that the wheels appear to be constructed on the screw 
 system, like the propeller of a steamer. Now, in the published de- 
 scription of Latham's flying-machine, we read, 'For the cross-Channel 
 flight a fifty horsepower Antoinette motor has been mounted. This 
 drives a screw which, placed in front of the machine, cleaves a way 
 through the air, pulling the machine after it. It is called a tractor 
 screw.' " 
 
 In the attempt to reconstruct the flying chariot, the Chinese 
 draughtsman stressed the second part of the compound and produced 
 the picture of a two- wheeled cart. In this point he is decidedly wrong, 
 
The Romance of Flying in Ancient China 21 
 
 for a vehicle of this type could never rise into the air. We have to fall 
 back on the words of the account itself, in order to form some idea of 
 what this airship might have been. The sole indication of a motive 
 power given in the text is the wind: the vehicle in question depended 
 upon favorable winds, and was propelled by the east wind if it wanted 
 to go east, and by the west wind when it was to return west. For 
 this reason it cannot be presumed that a car or chariot, in the strict 
 sense of the word, is involved. The word ch'o, which means a "car," 
 refers also to machines, engines, or contrivances which do not move; 
 thus, for instance, hua ch'o ("smooth car") signifies a "pulley"; shan 
 ch'o ("fan car"), a "winnowing mill." Now, as far as ancient China 
 is concerned, there were only two devices known as capable of setting 
 a vehicle in motion, — a sail and a kite. As to sails, the Chinese very 
 efficiently applied them (and presumably still apply them) to wheel- 
 barrows, as I repeatedly noticed myself on my travels in Shan-tung 
 Province; but a sail alone cannot lift any vehicle from the ground. 
 This, however, may be accomplished by several powerful kites. The 
 Chinese were the inventors of the flying-kite, as will be set forth in 
 the following chapter, and were in possession of kites at an early date, 
 assuredly in the third century of our era, the date of the Ti wang ski 
 hi. I imagine, therefore, that Ki-kung's "flying chariot" was built on 
 the aerostatic principle, being driven by a combination of sails and 
 kites, and was very much like the kite-chariot constructed by George 
 Pocock in 1826 and discussed in detail below (p. 41). The "chariot" 
 part of Ki-kung's machine may have been a very simple affair: all he 
 needed was a seat for himself, which may have been made of light 
 wood, bamboo, or basketry. 
 
 The famous boat-shaped aerial car, theoretically conceived by the 
 Jesuit Francesco Lana (1631-87), is reproduced in Plate V, not for its 
 own sake, but because it exhibits some affinity with Ki-kung's 
 machine and, mutatis mutandis, may help us visualize it to better 
 advantage. It was Lana's idea of lifting his ship into the air by means 
 of four large, hollow globes of very thin sheets of copper, from which 
 the air had been wholly extracted, thereby causing them to weigh less 
 than the surrounding atmosphere, and enabling them to rise and sup- 
 port the weight of the ship in the air; propulsion and direction were 
 to be obtained by sails and oars. The question of the practicability 
 of this proposal does not concern us here; what I wish to point out is 
 merely this, that if in Lana's sketch the four copper globes are re- 
 placed by four powerful paper kites, we may realize what the Chinese 
 aerostat might have been. 
 
22 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 The Chinese emperor, in the above story, caused the airship to be 
 destroyed, as he did not wish his own people to see it. He evidently 
 was anxious to remain intrenched on his throne and to steer clear of 
 innovations that might menace the safety of his realm. Francesco 
 Lana, in his Prodromo (1670, p. 61), gives us the best explanation of 
 the reasons which may have prompted that autocrat to his action. 
 Having developed his plan of an airship with sail and oars, as pointed 
 out above, the Jesuit author winds up thus: "I do not see any other 
 difficulty that could prevail against this invention, save one, which 
 seems to me weightier than all others, and this is that God will never 
 permit such a machine to be constructed, in order to preclude the 
 numerous consequences which might disturb the civil and political 
 government among men. For who sees not that no city would be 
 secure from surprise attacks, as the airship might appear at any hour 
 directly over its market-square and would land there its crew? The 
 same would happen to the courtyards of private houses and to ships 
 crossing the sea, for the airship would only have to descend out of the 
 air down to the sails of the sea-going vessels and lop their cables. 
 Even without descending, it could hurl iron pieces which would cap- 
 size the vessels and kill men, and the sh^ps might be burnt with artifi- 
 cial fire, balls, and bombs. This might be done not only to ships, but 
 also to houses, castles, and cities, with perfect safety for those who 
 throw such missiles down from an enormous height." 
 
 The first author in Europe who discussed the possibility of a 
 flying chariot was John Wilkins (1614-72), bishop of Chester from 
 1668 and subsequently Master at Trinity College, Cambridge, one of 
 the founders of the Royal Society, to which he acted as first secretary. 
 His writings, particularly his "Mathematicall Magick" (1648), con- 
 tributed much toward arousing public interest in the problem of 
 flight. He distinguishes (p. 199) "four several ways whereby this 
 flying in the air hath been or may be attempted. Two of them by the 
 strength of other things, and two of them by our own strength: 1. By 
 spirits or angels. 2. By the help of fowls. 3. By wings fastened im- 
 mediately to the body. 4. By a flying chariot." This fourth and last 
 way seems to him altogether probable and much more useful than 
 any of the rest. "And that is by a flying chariot, which may be so 
 contrived as to carry a man within it; and though the strength of a 
 spring might perhaps be serviceable for the motion of this engine, yet 
 it were better to have it assisted by the labour of some intelligent 
 mover as the heavenly orbs are supposed to be turned. And therefore 
 if it were made big enough to carry sundry persons together, then each 
 
The Romance of Flying in Ancient China 23 
 
 of them in their severall turns might successively labour in the caus- 
 ing of this motion; which thereby would be much more constant and 
 lasting, then it could otherwise be, if it did wholly depend on the 
 strength of the same person. This contrivance being as much to be 
 preferred before any of the other, as swimming in a ship before swim- 
 ming in water." 
 
 Kung-shu Tse, also called Lu Pan, "the mechanician of Lu," 
 because he was a native of the state of Lu in Shan-tung Province, was 
 a contemporary of Confucius and a clever mechanician. In the work 
 going under the name of the philosopher Mo Ti (chap. 49) who lived 
 in the fifth century before our era, he is said to have carved a magpie 
 from bamboo and wood; when completed, he caused this artificial 
 bird to fly, and only after three days it came down to earth. Accord- 
 ing to another tradition, Kung-shu himself made an ascent riding on 
 a wooden kite in order to spy on a city which he desired to capture. 
 Other Chinese writers ascribe the manufacture of a wooden kite to 
 Mo Ti, or to the collaboration of both Kung-shu Tse and Mo Ti, 
 saying that it could fly for three days without resting. Han Fei, a 
 philosopher of the third century before our era, relates that Mo Ti 
 worked for three years at a wooden kite, but that after flying for a 
 single day it was smashed. It is obvious that in these various ac- 
 counts there is a confusion of "three days" and "three years," while 
 no clear idea is conveyed of the construction and mechanism of the 
 artifact. Some Chinese authors regard this wooden kite as the be- 
 ginning and forerunner of the later toy, the paper kite; but this view 
 seems erroneous, as the bird is described as being carved from wood, 
 and as paper was unknown during the period in question. It appears 
 to have been rather an automatic, mechanical contrivance that was 
 capable of rising to some extent into the air, — a sort of affinity to 
 the dove of Archytas (p. 64). Certain it is that it was not Mo Ti, 
 as asserted by Han Fei and Lie-tse, who made the flying kite: in the 
 first place, Mo Ti was a philosopher of ethical and social tendencies 
 who did not engage in manual labor; second, Mo Ti himself saw it fit 
 to condemn the invention of the flying kite as an idle and useless 
 plaything. 
 
 Kung-shu Tse is credited with several other inventions, — two 
 kinds of a grinding mill and a scaling-ladder used in besieging cities, 
 known as "cloud-ladder" (yun t'i). He is also said to have made 
 wooden horses which moved by means of springs and could draw 
 carriages; or, according to another version, he made for his mother 
 
24 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 a wooden coachman who drove an automobile. At present Kung-shu 
 Tse is worshipped as the patron-saint of carpenters. 
 
 There is a curious incident on record in the Book of Rites {Li ki), 
 which illustrates the fact that even in his youth his thoughts were 
 concentrated on problems of engineering and that his contemporaries 
 were averse to his innovations. A certain individual's mother had 
 died, and Kung-shu asked leave to lower the coffin into the grave by 
 means of a new mechanical contrivance invented by him. Its appli- 
 cation was objected to by one present at the funeral on the ground 
 that the ancient practices of the principality of Lu ought to be up- 
 held, and it was ironically suggested to the inventor that he should 
 test his ingenuity rather on his own mother than on that of another 
 man. 
 
 It is small wonder that later legends have grossly exaggerated Lu 
 Pan's mechanical skill. Thus a story is current that he made a 
 wooden kite which was mounted by his father, and the old man flew 
 as far as Wu-hui, a town in the prefecture of Su-chou, Kiang-su 
 Province, the ancient kingdom of Wu. The people there took the 
 landing flyer for a devil and slew him. Lu Pan, infuriated at this 
 detestable crime, carved a wooden effigy of some evil spirit, whose 
 hand pointed in the direction of Wu and caused a drought there for 
 a period of three years. On consulting the oracle, the inhabitants of 
 Wu recognized that this calamity was brought about by Lu Pan, 
 and appeased his wrath with supplications and presents, whereupon 
 he chopped off the hand of the statue, and rain fell abundantly in 
 the kingdom. According to another legend of comparatively recent 
 date, Lu Pan made a wooden kite; all it was necessary to do was to 
 rap at the door-post three times, and the kite flew off, carrying away 
 the person who was mounted on it. There is reason to believe that 
 Kung-shu Tse and Lu Pan are two distinct individuals and that the 
 two were merged into one by subsequent traditions, but this question 
 does not concern us here; we are interested in the mechanical contri- 
 vance itself, and for this purpose the texts of the early philosophers 
 only merit consideration. 
 
 Wang Ch'ung (A. D. 27-97), philosopher, critic, and sceptic, who 
 poked fun at the literati, discredits Lu Pan's invention in the follow- 
 ing discourse: — 
 
 "From wood he carved a kite capable of flying for three days 
 without descending. It is possible that he made a wooden kite and 
 was able to fly it; but the report that it did not alight for three days 
 is exaggerated. Carving it from wood, he gave it the shape of a bird; 
 
The Romance of Flying in Ancient China 25 
 
 how, then, could it fly without resting? If it could soar, why 
 just for three days? In case it was equipped with a mechanism by 
 which it was set in motion and continued to fly, it might not have 
 descended. In this case it should be said that it flew continually, not 
 for three days. There is a report that through his own skill Lu Pan 
 lost his mother. Being a skilled mechanic, he had constructed for her 
 a wooden carriage and horses with a wooden charioteer. When the 
 apparatus was completed, he set his mother in the carriage which 
 sped away and never returned. Thus he lost his mother. Provided the 
 mechanism of the wooden kite was well arranged, it must have been 
 like that of the wooden carriage and horses; in this case it would have 
 continued to fly without stopping. On the other hand, a mechanism 
 functions but a short while, and for this reason the kite could not 
 have kept up its motion for more than three days. This also holds 
 good for the wooden carriage, which should have come to a stop 
 after three days on the road, instead of going on so that his mother 
 was lost. Apparently the two stories are untrustworthy." 
 
 It is obvious that as early as the first century of our era real 
 knowledge of this contrivance was lost. 
 
 Aside from the dove of Archytas to which reference has been 
 made, Lu Pan's wooden magpie or kite meets with another curious 
 parallel in the West. The astronomer Regiomontanus, who lived at 
 Nuremberg in the fifteenth century, is said to have constructed an 
 eagle which, on the emperor's (Charles V) approach to the city, he 
 sent out high in the air a long way to meet him, and which accom- 
 panied him to the city gates. I. B. Hart furnishes this comment, 
 "Shorn of all the inevitable additions of credulous narrators, the pro- 
 bability is that Regiomontanus, who was of a mechanical turn of 
 mind, fashioned a clockwork contrivance which, more by luck possi- 
 bly than by design , acted as a glider when released . ' ' Regiomontanus 
 is also credited with having had an automaton in perpetual motion 
 in his workshop and with having made a fly which, taking its flight 
 from his hand, would fly around the room, and at last, as if weary, 
 would return to his master's hand. Francesco Lana, in his "Prodromo" 
 (1670, pp. 50-51), has given directions as to how to make birds 
 which fly through the air. Considering the fact that such like con- 
 trivances are reported from different parts of the world and at widely 
 varying times, we cannot refrain from concluding that a grain of 
 truth must underlie these accounts and that Lu Pan's wooden kite 
 also, even granted that like other inventions it has been magnified, to 
 some extent was an object of reality and had a foundation in fact. 
 
26 The Prehistory op Aviation 
 
 Perhaps it was a primitive form of glider, perhaps it was connected 
 with and raised by a flying kite. 
 
 Starting from realistic means of flight, Chinese efforts did not 
 continue in this direction. Strangely enough, from realism they 
 developed into mysticism and magic. From the second century B.C. 
 alchemical lore coming from the West began to infiltrate Chinese 
 thought; quest of the elixir of life and the desire to transmute J)ase 
 metals into gold allied themselves with ancient native conceptions of 
 formulas for securing longevity and immortality in a better land. 
 The notion of flight was a link of paramount importance in this 
 chain of mystic dreams which held the minds of the people enthralled 
 for many centuries. 
 
 Liu An, commonly known as Huai-nan Tse (second century be- 
 fore our era) was much given to alchemistic studies and to search for 
 the elixir of life on which he published several treatises. Tradition 
 credits him with the discovery of an elixir which he finally drank, 
 with the effect that he rose to heaven in broad daylight. The vessel 
 which contained the beverage of immortality he dropped into his 
 courtyard, and when the dogs and poultry sipped the dregs, they 
 immediately sailed up to heaven after him. 
 
 Li Shao-kun, an adept of alchemy and the magic arts under the 
 emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (140-87 B.C.), over whom he gained 
 great influence, made an elixir of life and pretended to be able to 
 transmute cinnabar into gold. He described his magic powers in this 
 strain, "I know how to harden snow and change it into white silver. 
 I know how cinnabar transforms its nature and passes into yellow 
 gold. I can rein the flying dragon and visit the extremities of the 
 earth. I can bestride the hoary crane and soar above the nine de- 
 grees of heaven." 
 
 Indeed, the riding conveyance favorite with Taoist saints for 
 taking passage into the beyond is the crane, a bird famed in Chinese 
 lore and endowed with many supernatural attributes. He is said to 
 reach a fabulous age, and when six hundred years old, to dispense 
 with solid food, but to continue to drink water. Of the four kinds of 
 crane, — the black, the yellow, the white, and the blue ones, — the 
 black one is the longest-lived. He is hence reputed as the patriarch of 
 the feathered tribe, and manifests a particular interest in human 
 affairs. Men have repeatedly been transformed into the shape of a 
 crane, and he transports to the regions of eternal bliss those who have 
 
The Romance of Flying in Ancient China 27 
 
 attained the degree of sainthood in this life, as he also serves as a 
 vehicle to the goddes Si Wang Mu (Plate VI). This picture is a 
 small section from a large embroidered screen in twelve panels in the 
 Museum's collection, depicting the celebration of the goddess' birth- 
 day when the Eight Immortals appear to offer congratulations and 
 rich gifts. The goddess surrounded by attendants alights from her 
 celestial quarters on the back of a flying crane. 
 
 Wang Tse-k'iao, who was the eldest son of king Ling of the Chou 
 dynasty and lived in the sixth century before our era, studied the 
 black art for thirty years under a magician named Fou-k'iu Kung. 
 One day he sent a message to his kin, saying that he would appear to 
 them on the seventh day of the seventh moon on the summit of a 
 mountain; and indeed, on the appointed day, he was seen riding 
 through the air on a white crane, waving his farewell to the world 
 and ascending to heaven to join the ranks of the immortals. 
 
 Ting-ling Wei (second century of our era), a student of the black 
 art, was transformed into a crane a thousand years after his death, that 
 he might revisit earth and his old home, when he bewailed the 
 changes that time had wrought upon men and their hearts. 
 
 Wang K'iao, who lived in the first century of our era, used to 
 report regularly at court; but as he had no chariot or horses, ,the 
 emperor Ming of the Han dynasty was curious to learn how he man- 
 aged to travel such a long distance, and instructed the Grand Astro- 
 loger to find out. The imperial messenger was amazed to discover 
 that Wang did the trick by riding upon a pair of wild ducks, which 
 bore him swiftly through the air. Hence he lay in wait and threw a 
 net over the birds; but when he went to seize them, he found only a 
 pair of official shoes which had been presented to Wang by the 
 emperor. 
 
 Less frequently a tiger is made the aerial courser. This was the 
 climax of the life of Madame Ts'ai Luan, who lived in the fourth and 
 fifth centuries of our era and made a study of the black art. These 
 efforts, however, did not have any riches in store for her; for she 
 remained poor and eked out a meagre livelihood by making copies of 
 a dictionary of rhymes, which she sold to scholars. Her reward came 
 ten years later when she and her husband went up to heaven on a 
 pair of white tigers. 
 
 Some accomplished the ascent to' heaven even without the me- 
 dium of a riding animal. Thus Ma Tse-jan, reputed for his wide 
 knowledge of simples and in great demand as a physician, studied 
 
28 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 the doctrines and practices of Taoism, and was ultimately taken up to 
 heaven alive. 
 
 Plate VII illustrates a Taoist saint comfortably flying in the air 
 from cliff to cliff, simply driven by the wind, while two wanderers on 
 the mountain path gaze at him in bewilderment. This picture is a 
 landscape drawn in ink, probably of the Ming period. 
 
 "Shoes which enable one to ascend the clouds" (teng yiin li) are 
 ascribed by tradition to Sun Pin; they were made of fish-skin and 
 enabled their wearer to walk on water and to tread one louds. "Fly- 
 ing cloud shoes" (Jei yun li) are attributed to the famous poet Po Kii-i 
 (A.D. 772-846): when he was engaged in preparing an elixir on 
 Mount Lu in Kiang-si Province, one of the haunted grottoes of the 
 Taoists, he made these shoes of fine black damask, cutting a cluster 
 of clouds out of plain raw silk which he dyed with four choice aro- 
 matics. When he moved around in these shoes, he looked like smoky 
 mist, as though clouds were rising from beneath his feet and as 
 though he would before long ascend to the celestial palace. These 
 magic shoes are an echo of the thousand-league boots of our folk-lore 
 of which more will be said in the chapter on India. 
 
 In the long history of this struggle for the conquest of the air, two 
 singular ideas finally come to the fore — levitation by means of star- 
 vation and application of remedies taken internally. The slogan of 
 this school was: Live on air to conquer the air! 
 
 These Taoist ideas may partially be traceable to India. The 
 Buddhist saints of the Tantra school also had the notion of obtaining 
 supernatural powers which would enable them to transmute their 
 bodies and to assume any shape at will, as well as to traverse space 
 with the most rapid possible motion. 
 
 Leading a natural life in the seclusion of mountains in close con- 
 tact with nature was believed to be conducive to obtaining longevity 
 and immortality. The highest ambition of many Taoist hermits, 
 then, was to reduce their weight, to lighten their bodies, to release 
 their souls, and thus to obtain the ability to fly toward heaven. Chang 
 Tao-ling (A.D. 34-156), known as the first Taoist pope, retired to the 
 mountains and devoted himself to the study of alchemy and to culti- 
 vating the virtues of purity and mental abstraction. The white tiger 
 presiding over the west and the green dragon ruling the quarter of 
 the east appeared in the air above his habitation, and finally he 
 reached his goal and found the elixir of immortality. He swallowed 
 a dose of it, and the sixty year old man was suddenly transformed 
 into a vigorous youth. Soon after when he made a pilgrimage to a 
 
The Romance of Flying in Ancient China 29 
 
 sacred mountain in the proximity of the city of Ho-nan, he met on 
 the road a man who disclosed to him the location of a cave; it con- 
 cealed, he intimated, occult writings whose study would enable him 
 to obtain the power of flying skyward. After fasting and purifying 
 himself he found the books in question, and by studying these he 
 attained the gift of ubiquity, and was capable of assuming simul- 
 taneously various shapes. After years of meditation and efforts spent 
 on exorcism of demons he was deemed worthy of appearing before 
 Lao-tse, and ascended as an immortal to the heavens with his wife 
 and two favorite disciples. 
 
 An-k'i Sheng, a legendary magician who lived on the Isles of the 
 Blest in the Eastern Ocean and possessed the power of rendering 
 himself visible or invisible at will, visited the Lo-fou Mountains in 
 Kwang-tung Province, where he subsisted only on the stalks of 
 water-rushes; by virtue of this diet he finally became emancipated 
 from the dross of earth, and ascending the summit of the White 
 Cloud Mountain, rose to heaven before the eyes of his companion. 
 The recipe "living on air" was tried, for instance, by Chang Liang, 
 who died in 187 before our era. He began to eliminate food in the 
 hope of gaining levitation of the body and finally immortality, but 
 failed, because he once yielded to the solicitations of the empress 
 and ate a bit of rice. 
 
 A good example of this sort of hunger-strike apostle is presented 
 by Li Pi (A.D. 722-789), who as a youth was keenly devoted to the 
 study of Taoism and would roam in the mountains, pondering upon 
 the secret of immortality. He declined to marry, abstained from all 
 substantial food except fruit and berries, and practised the art of 
 breathing, which is believed by the Taoists to conduce to immortality. 
 He finally became reduced to a skeleton, and received the nickname 
 "the Collar-bone Immortal of Ye." Chang Cho also, a scholar of 
 the ninth century, trained himself to get along without food. He was 
 able to cut butterflies out of paper, which would flutter about and 
 return to his hands. Lu Ts'ang-yung, son of an official, flunked in 
 the civil service examinations and retired with his brother to the 
 mountains, where they lived as hermits and studied the art of getting 
 along without food (which in our own times many students of art 
 and science have involuntarily imitated). 
 
 The climax of this movement was reached in the preparation of a 
 nostrum for promoting the art of flying. 
 
 T'ao Hung-king (A.D. 452-536), a distinguished physician and a 
 celebrated adept in the mysteries of Taoism, compounded what is 
 
30 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 known as the "flying elixir" (fei tan): it did not contain any medi- 
 cinal drugs, but was a mixture of gold, cinnabar, azurite, and sul- 
 phur, — ingredients which had been contributed by the emperor. 
 This compound is said to have had the color of hoarfrost and snow 
 and to have been bitter of taste. When swallowed, it was believed 
 to produce levitation of the body. The emperor tasted and tested it, 
 found it beneficial, and conferred honors on the manufacturer. I think 
 this is the only example in the history of the world in the way of teach- 
 ing to fly by means of a medicine taken internally; but from the view- 
 point of Chinese alchemical and religious lore it is quite intelligible 
 how this notion could spring into existence. 
 
 In speaking of the Yogins of India, Marco Polo writes, "They 
 are extremely long-lived, every man of them living to a hundred and 
 fifty or two hundred years. They eat very little, but what they do 
 eat is good; rice and milk chiefly. And these people make use of a 
 very strange beverage; for they make a potion of sulphur and quick- 
 silver mixed together, and this they drink twice every month. This, 
 they say, gives them long life; and it is a potion they are used to take 
 from their childhood." The alchemists of both Asia and Europe re- 
 garded sulphur and mercury, combined under different conditions 
 and various proportions, as the origin of all metals. Mercury was 
 called the mother of metals; sulphur, the father. 
 
 The desire to obtain eternal youth focused on the elixir of immor- 
 tality, the fountain of youth, or the rejuvenescent water of life, has 
 haunted mankind through all ages. It was this theme, that oc- 
 cupied Nathaniel Hawthorne's mind throughout his life and that 
 culminated in his unfinished romance which rested upon his coffin. 
 
KITES AS PRECURSORS OF AEROPLANES 
 
 A flying-kite may be defined as an aeroplane which cannot be 
 manned, and an aeroplane may be defined as a kite which can be 
 manned. This definition implies the interrelation of the two mechani- 
 cal devices. How this development was brought about will be 
 demonstrated on the following pages. Kites were invented and first 
 put to a practical test in ancient China; hence the Chinese must be 
 credited with a substantial contribution to the advance of aero- 
 nautics. In January, 1894, O. Chanute wrote in Chicago, "It would 
 not at all be surprising to find, should a stable aeroplane be hereafter 
 produced, that it has its prototype in a Chinese kite." And history 
 proves him right. 
 
 It must not be imagined that the Chinese kite is anything like the 
 flimsy, cross-shaped structure of wood covered with paper of a 
 diamond-shaped surface that we used to fly in our boyhood days. 
 This toy is a poor degenerate orphan put to blush in comparison with 
 the ingenious creations of the Chinese, which are wonders of both 
 technique and art. The ordinary Chinese kites are made of a light, 
 elastic framework of bamboo over which is spread a sheet of strong 
 paper painted in brilliant hues with human or animal figures. They 
 generously display that love of art and that whole gamut of decora- 
 tive design which runs through the life of the Chinese nation. Favo- 
 rite subjects are mythological figures and monsters, dragons, actors, 
 and heroes of popular plays, beautiful women, animals of all de- 
 scriptions, birds of prey, serpents, frogs and fishes, flies and butter- 
 flies as well as centipedes, also flower-baskets and boats. In the bird- 
 kites the thin paper attached to the wings is moved by the wind and 
 simulates the flapping of the wings. It goes without saying that, as 
 indicated by the common term "paper kite" (chi yilan) for the device, 
 kites are a favorite pattern frequently in evidence. Not only the 
 great variety of quaint shapes and designs is amazing, but also the 
 correct calculation or premeditated evaluation of the distance effect; 
 viewed in close proximity the kite pictures may seem dispropor- 
 tionately large or exaggerated or even distorted, while naturally they 
 are designed for a distant vista and in fact, when towering high in 
 the air, appear most beautiful and so life-like that they may be taken 
 for real birds. Again, the kite in the air is hardly ever stationary, but 
 constantly on the move, hovering and soaring, and as it moves on, 
 appears more and more as a legitimate denizen of the atmosphere. 
 
 31 
 
32 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 And then the stupendous skill of the hands which manipulate the 
 flying monsters! A long coil of tough cord is wound over a reel, and 
 it is the reel, not the cord, which is held in the hand and is continually 
 turned as the paper plane rises. 
 
 The most complicated and ingenious of these flying-machines is 
 the centipede kite. One which I obtained at Peking in 1901 for the 
 American Museum of Natural History in New York (together with a 
 collection of some seventy kites, all of different types) measures forty 
 feet in length, and is made to fold up accordion-like. The fierce head 
 of the creature with huge eyes and gaping jaws is surmounted by 
 long, protuding horns. The body consists of a series of some twenty- 
 five disks, about a foot in diameter, formed of a bamboo frame 
 covered with paper. These are painted with concentric zones in 
 black, yellow, and white. The disks are connected with one another 
 by two cords which keep them equidistant, and are fastened to a 
 transverse bamboo rod from which sticks run crosswise to the centre 
 of the disks. The latter revolve when the kite is being flown. The 
 rear disk is provided with streamers that form the tail. It requires 
 great skill to raise this kite, and cords are attached to three or more 
 points of the body to keep it under control. In a strong wind several 
 men are required to hold the reel. Seen in the air with its gigantic 
 proportions, its huge glaring eyes swiftly twirling in their sockets, 
 its weird, wriggling, serpentine motions, it conveys the impression 
 of some fossil monster of bygone ages having suddenly come back to 
 life. A centipede kite of smaller dimensions is also made in Hawaii. 
 
 0. Chanute justly calls attention to the fact that this device 
 resembles in arrangement the multiple disk kites suggested and de- 
 signed for life-saving in shipwrecks by E. J. Cordner, an Irish Catholic 
 priest, in 1859. 
 
 Mechanically kites are constructed on the principle underlying 
 the behavior of a soaring bird which performs its movements with 
 peculiarly curved and warped surfaces. 
 
 The ninth day of the ninth month in the autumn is devoted to 
 the festival called Ch'ung-yang which is celebrated by ascending 
 hills. Friends and acquaintances join for a picnic on some eminence 
 in the neighborhood of their town and set kites adrift, as the autum- 
 nal breezes favor the sport. This also is the great day for holding kite 
 contests. Any kite, no matter to whom it belongs, may be cut down 
 by another. For this purpose the cord near the kite is stiffened with 
 crushed glass or porcelain smeared on with fish-glue. The kite-flyer 
 manoeuvres to get his kite to windward of that of his rival, allows 
 
Kites as Precursors of Aeroplanes 33 
 
 his cord to drift against that of his opponent and by a sudden jerk 
 to cut it through, so that the hostile kite is brought down. 
 
 A musical kite was first invented by Li Ye of the tenth century of 
 our era, an expert kite-maker, who was purveyor of kites for his 
 imperial majesty. He made an ordinary paper kite with a string 
 attached to it and fastened to the kite's head a bamboo flute. He 
 flew this kite in such a manner that when the wind struck the holes 
 of the flute and produced sounds like those of a harpsichord (cheng), 
 which originally had twelve, at present, however, has thirteen, brass 
 strings. Hence a new term for kites came into vogue — "wind harpsi- 
 chord" (Jung cheng), which is now used indiscriminately for any 
 kite. 
 
 Such flutes are still occasionally used in connection with kites. 
 They consist of a short bamboo tube closed at the ends and provided 
 with three apertures, — one in the centre and one at either extremity. 
 When the kite is flying, the air, in rushing into the holes of the in- 
 strument, produces a somewhat intense and plaintive sound, which 
 can be heard at a great distance. Sometimes three or four of these 
 bamboo tubes are placed one above another over the kite, and in this 
 case a very pronounced deep sound is produced. Imagine that hun- 
 dreds of such kites may be released at a time and are hovering in the 
 air, and there is a veritable aerial orchestra at play. This music has a 
 beneficial effect, for it is thought to scour evil spirits from the atmo- 
 sphere. To strengthen this benevolent influence, a captive kite, 
 during the prevalence of winds, is often affixed to the roof of a house 
 when during the whole night it will emit plaintive murmurs. Still 
 more frequently, at least in Peking in the age of the Manchu dynasty, 
 there was attached to the top of a kite a musical bow of light willow- 
 wood or bamboo strung with a silken cord. When struck by the wind, 
 the instrument would produce humming sounds like an Aeolian harp. 
 Thus the Chinese were the first who knew how to produce "music on 
 the air." At night paper lanterns with a lighted candle inside were 
 sometimes suspended from small kites in the shape of butterflies, and 
 these were again attached to the main or pilot kite of much larger 
 dimensions. Ear and eye are thus treated to a feast, but this is not 
 all. To make the performance still more spectacular, messengers con- 
 sisting of bamboo frames with fire-crackers attached are sent up the 
 strings from which the kite is governed, and the crackers are timed to 
 explode on reaching the top. 
 
 Archdeacon J. H. Gray, in his excellent book "China" (1878), 
 says, "In the centre of Chinese kites, four or five metallic strings are 
 
34 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 fixed on the principle of the Aeolian harp. When they are flying, 
 'slow-lisping notes as of the Aeolian lyre' are distinctly heard." 
 
 He then' records from oral tradition the following story in ex- 
 planation of this musical apparatus: "During the reign of the emperor 
 Liu Pang, the founder of the Han dynasty, a general who was much 
 attached to the dynasty which had been ooliged to give way before 
 the more powerful house of Han, resolved to make a last vigorous 
 effort to drive Liu Pang from the throne he had recently usurped. A 
 battle, however, resulted in the army of the general being hemmed in 
 and threatened with annihilation. At his wit's end to devise a method 
 of escape, he at last conceived the ingenious idea of frightening the 
 enemy by flying kites, fitted with Aeolian strings, over their camp in 
 the dead of night. The wind was favorable, and when all was wrapt 
 in darkness and silence, the forces of Liu Pang heard sounds in the air 
 resembling Fu Han! Beware of Han! It was their guardian angels, 
 they declared, who were warning them of impending danger, and 
 they precipitately fled, hotly pursued by the general and his army." 
 
 Kites were originally used in China for military signalling and for 
 such purposes only, but in the beginning they were not connected 
 with any religious practices, as is erroneously stated by several 
 authors. Thus Hodgson (History of Aeronautics, p. 368) writes, "It 
 cannot be doubted that the kite, though of uncertain, is nevertheless 
 of very ancient origin. .. Though in wide-spread use as a pastime 
 among the Chinese, Japanese, Maoris, and other peoples, its origin is 
 usually ascribed to religion." Originally it was not a toy either; this 
 is a later development which set in from the time of the Sung dynasty. 
 
 There is no Chinese document dealing with kites that contains a 
 word about religious observances in connection with them. The idea 
 that a kite functions as a scapegoat charming away the owner's sins 
 and misfortunes is a recent development to be found locally and spora- 
 dically, but it is not general; it is more developed in Korea than in 
 China, but at any rate it bears no relation to the origin of kites. 
 
 The beginning of kites in China cannot be clearly traced. It is a 
 curious fact that just in those things which are characteristically Chi- 
 nese their records fail us — partially perhaps because these things seem 
 trivial, partially because Chinese scholars are of the bookish type 
 and poor observers of real life. A paltry object like a kite was some- 
 what below their dignity; nevertheless kites have been made the 
 subject of a score of poetical compositions. In times of early anti- 
 quity kites did not exist: they are not mentioned, for instance, as it 
 might be expected, in the treatise on the Art of War which Sun Wu 
 
Kites as Precursors of Aeroplanes 35 
 
 wrote in the sixth century before our era and of which we have an 
 excellent English translation by Lionel Giles. 
 
 It has been pointed out in the preceding chapter that Kung-shu's 
 wooden bird was not a flying-kite. The earliest notion of this device 
 looms up in the life of Han Sin, who died in 196 before our era. He is 
 known as one of the Three Heroes who assisted Liu Pang in ascending 
 the throne as first emperor of the Han dynasty. He was desirous of 
 digging a tunnel into the Wei-yang Palace, and is said to have flown a 
 paper kite for the purpose of measuring the distance to the palace. 
 Some explain that he did so by measuring the length of the cord 
 fastened to the kite; others with a bolder grip of imagination pretend 
 that he himself ascended on the kite to gain a free outlook on the 
 palace. It is more probable that Han Sin introduced kites into war- 
 fare, using them in trigonometrical calculations of the distance from 
 the hostile army. Be this as it may, the story is not well authenti- 
 cated; it is not contained in contemporaneous records, but only in 
 comparatively late sources. If for no other reason, it is suspicious 
 that Han Sin's kite is said to have been made of paper, while paper 
 was invented only three hundred years later. 
 
 Chinese authors are wont to speak of "paper kites," but rag-paper 
 was invented by Ts'ai Lun only in A.D. 105. Ever since paper has 
 come into use, kites have been made of this material, and no other is 
 employed for them. Nevertheless it is not reasonable to argue that 
 prior to the invention of rag-paper kites could not have been made; 
 the framework might have been covered with silk, hemp, or some 
 other light fabric as well, — only Chinese records are reticent as to 
 this point. The Polynesians enlist bark-cloth (tapa) for their kites, 
 and as will be seen below, the first kite made in England was of 
 linen, while Benjamin Franklin's famous kite was of silk. 
 
 In A.D. 549 Hou King (502-552) besieged the city of T'ai in 
 which Kien-wen, subsequently the emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty, 
 was bottled up. Unable to communicate with the outside world, 
 Kien-wen had a paper kite made with a message attached to it and 
 gent it up into the air that his friends might be advised of his perilous 
 plight. One of Hou King's officers, Wang Wei by name, saw the kite 
 rise and ordered his best archers to take a shot at it (first example of 
 anti-aircraft practice) . The kite dropped, but, as tradition has it, was 
 transformed into a bird that escaped into the clouds, no one knowing 
 where it went — which probably means that the kite, after all, had 
 not been hit. This story is on record in the Tu i chi written by Li Yu 
 of the T'ang dynasty. In A.D. 781 when Chang P'ei, a loyal general, 
 
36 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 defended the city Lin-ming against T'ien Yiie who had revolted 
 against the reigning house of T'ang, Chang released a kite to inform 
 Ma Sui of the predicament of the garrison which was exposed to 
 starvation. Again, in this case, the kite was espied by the hostile 
 camp, and T'ien commanded his archers to. bring it down, but in 
 this attempt they failed. The garrison held out until Ma Sui came 
 to its relief when a crushing defeat was inflicted on the besiegers. 
 
 Many European authors who are only too prone to accentuate 
 the topsy-turvy-dom of the Chinese assert wrongly that kite-flying 
 is exclusively pursued in China by adults, not by boys. It is certainly 
 true that the men are passionate and expert kite-flyers, and it is 
 equally true that many kites, owing to their enormous size and 
 weight, can be manipulated by grown-ups only. But how should the 
 man acquire his skill had he not gained his practice from early boy- 
 hood days? Boys assuredly play with kites, and have done so from 
 the days of the Sung dynasty (the end of the tenth century). From 
 that period onward there are many records and pictures testifying 
 to the kite-flying of youngsters, and they are even encouraged to 
 indulge in this wholesome pastime for the reason that "it makes them 
 throw their heads back and open their mouths, thus getting rid of 
 internal heat." Plate VIII illustrates an outdoor scene: boys sporting 
 with kites from a Sung painting depicting the games and entertain- 
 ments of a hundred boys, by Su Han-ch'en, a renowned artist of the 
 twelfth century. 
 
 From China kites were diffused to all other nations of eastern 
 Asia who experienced the influence of Chinese civilization — Korea, 
 Japan, Annam, Camboja, Siam, Malaysia, inclusive of the Philip- 
 pines and Borneo. As in China, kite-flying has developed into a 
 national pastime in Korea and Japan which received their culture 
 from the mother-country. 
 
 In some parts of Indonesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia kites are 
 turned to a practical purpose for catching fish. A fishing-line to the 
 end of which is fastened a baited hook or noose is attached to a kite 
 which is flown from the end of a canoe over the water; the bait is 
 made to play over the surface of the sea by the movements of the 
 kite in the wind. When the fish bites, the kite goes down. In Poly- 
 nesia kite-flying is pursued for amusement only, chiefly in New 
 Zealand, the Cook group, Tahiti, Hervey Islands, the Marquesas, 
 Tuamotu, Easter Island, and Hawaii; kites are unknown in Samoa 
 and Tonga. 
 
Kites as Precursors of Aeroplanes 37 
 
 Kites were introduced into India from China either through the 
 Malays or Chinese immigrants or both. Kite-flying is a popular 
 amusement in India during the spring. Matches are often made for 
 considerable stakes. As in China, the strings are coated with crushed 
 glass smeared on with glue, and each player seeks to manoeuvre his 
 kite so as to cut his rival's string. Respectable elderly gentlemen 
 also take keen interest in the game. 
 
 In Siam, kite-flying was a state ceremony as well as a public 
 festivity. Large paper kites were sent up into the air with the object 
 of promoting the seasonal wind by the fluttering noise made by them. 
 The festival was obviously connected with agriculture and the ap- 
 pearance of the north-east monsoon. 
 
 The ancients were not acquainted with the flying-kite. Archytas' 
 wooden dove, as pointed out on p. 64, is not a kite. There is no refer- 
 ence to a kite in the writings of any Greek or Roman author. The 
 fact remains that kites were introduced into Europe from the East 
 not earlier than the end of the sixteenth century. The Chinese were 
 the inventors of it, and all data at our disposal go to prove that the 
 kite spread from the Far East westward to the Near East and finally 
 to Europe, and that it makes its debut in Europe as a Chinese con- 
 trivance, not as a heritage of classical antiquity. 
 
 Musailima, the false prophet, a contemporary of Mohammed, is 
 said to have employed at night paper kites with musical bows in 
 order to convey the impression to his adherents that he was commu- 
 nicating with angels. Al-Jahiz, who died in A. D. 869, in his Book 
 of Animals (Kitab al-hayawan), speaks of "flags of the boys which 
 were made of Chinese carton and paper; to these tails and wings 
 were attached, little bells were tied to their fronts, and on breezy 
 days they were released into the air from long and firm threads." 
 
 Kite-flying is well known to the Turks as a sport both for children 
 and adults. The kite is called in Osmanli kartal ("eagle"), in Jagatai 
 and Cumanian sar ("sparrow-hawk"). 
 
 In European literature kites are first described by the Italian 
 Giovanni Batista in his book on natural magic (Magia naturalis, 
 1589) and by J. J. Wecker (De secretis, 1592). The Jesuit Athanasius 
 Kircher (Ars magna lucis, 1646) was well acquainted with kites. As 
 is well known, he also wrote a book on China which is based on infor- 
 mation received from the members of his order working in China. 
 
 Francesco Lana (1670, p. 50) informs us that in his time kites 
 were manipulated by the children of Italy. He calls them drago 
 ("dragon"), while the Italians now designate them aquilone ("north 
 
38 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 wind"), cometa ("comet"), or cervo-volante ("flying-stag") in accord- 
 ance with French cerf-volant. German drache is doubtless based on the 
 Italian appellation, and the Russians speak of a serpent (zmdi or 
 zmdika). The Spaniards style a kite pajaro ("bird, sparrow") or 
 papagayo ("parrot"). Curiously enough, the correct Chinese term 
 "kite" (yttari) is preserved in our English word, and this seems to 
 hint at the fact that paper kites were directly imported from China 
 into England with the correct label attached. 
 
 J. Strutt, in his classical book "The Sports and Pastimes of the 
 People of England," informs us that the kite probably received its 
 name from having originally been made in the shape of the bird called 
 a kite and that in a short French and English Dictionary published 
 by Miege in 1690 the word cerf-volant is said to denote a paper 
 kite, — the first registration of the word he found. "I have been told," 
 he winds up, "that in China the flying of paper kites is a very ancient 
 pastime, and practised much more generally by the children there 
 than it is in England. From that country perhaps it was brought to 
 us, but the time of its introduction is unknown to me; however, I do 
 not find any reason to conclude that it existed here much more than 
 a century back" (Strutt wrote in 1801). Certainly kites were used 
 in England a considerable time prior to 1690. 
 
 In the middle of the seventeenth century kites were commonly 
 employed in England for the purpose of letting off fireworks. John 
 Bate, in his "Mysteries of Nature and Art" (1634), describes the 
 making of a kite to this end, though he avoids the word itself. "You 
 must take a piece of linnen cloth of a yard or more in length," he 
 writes, "it must be cut after the form of a pane of glass; fasten two 
 light sticks cross the same, to make it stand at breadth; then smear it 
 over with linseed oil and liquid varnish tempered together, or else wet 
 it with oil of Peter; and unto the longest corner fasten a match pre- 
 pared with saltpeter water upon which you may fasten divers 
 crackers, or saucissons; betwixt every of which bind a knot of paper- 
 shavings, which will make it flie the better; then tie a small rope of 
 length sufficient to raise it unto what height you shall desire, and to 
 guite it withall ; then fire the match, and raise it against the wind in an 
 open field, and as the match burneth, it will fire the crackers and 
 saucissons, which will give divers blows in the ayer." Bate's kite is 
 reproduced in Plate IX. It has the shape of a lozenge, and is 
 equipped with a tail to afford stability. This type of kite was com- 
 monly used in England down to the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
Kites as Precursors of Aeroplanes 39 
 
 S. Butler ( Hudibras, 1664) alludes to the kite in scoffing at the 
 prophecies based on the appearance of comets: — 
 
 It happen'd as a boy, one night, 
 
 Did fly his tarcel of a kite; 
 
 His train was six yards long, milk-white, 
 
 At th' end of which, there hung a light, 
 
 Inclosed in lanthorn made of paper. . . 
 
 A tarcel is a young hawk. The Oxford English Dictionary contains 
 an interesting quotation from Marvell (1672) : He may make a great 
 paper-kite of his own letter of 850 pages. 
 
 In Europe, finally, kites were employed for scientific purposes, for 
 the first time, it is said, by Alexander Wilson, professor of astronomy 
 at Glasgow University, who claimed in 1778 that he used kites at- 
 tached to wire for electrical experiments long before Franklin in 1749 
 and that with four or five paper kites strung one above another he 
 raised thermometers to an altitude of three thousand feet, in order to 
 determine the temperature in the clouds. 
 
 In 1752 Benjamin Franklin made his experiment of collecting 
 atmospheric electricity through the medium of a kite covered with 
 silk and fitted at the top with a metal point. This experiment de- 
 monstrated the identity of lightning with electricity. Franklin's kite 
 consisted of a framework in the shape of a cross made of two light 
 strips of cedar. Over this frame was stretched a silk handkerchief 
 tied to the four ends. From the top of the upright stick of the cross 
 extended a sharp-pointed wire the length of a foot. A silk ribbon was 
 tied to the end of the string which held the kite, the end next the 
 hand, and a key suspended at the junction of the twine and silk. 
 The kite was raised by Franklin during a thunderstorm in June, 1752, 
 and almost immediately he experienced a spark on applying his 
 knuckles to the key. When the cord was moistened by a passing 
 shower, the electricity grew abundant. A Leyden jar was charged at 
 the key, and by the spark thus obtained spirits were ignited, and 
 other experiments performed. 
 
 Franklin's memorable experiments established definitely the ser- 
 vice of the kite for scientific purposes. It was adapted especially to 
 meteorological work, self-registering thermometers being sent up with 
 it. Thus it is an efficient means of obtaining observations in the free 
 air at moderate elevations. For all greater heights a balloon is used; 
 the kite, however, can be used in stormy weather when the balloon 
 is not serviceable; but the special advantage of the kite lies in the 
 fact that the self-recording apparatus is thoroughly ventilated by the 
 
40 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 wind, and therefore gives the temperature and moisture of the free 
 air with the least possible error introduced by solar heat or instru- 
 mental radiation. 
 
 Both in China and Japan there are stories current about men rid- 
 ing on kites through the air. There is a tradition alive in Japan that 
 Yui-no Shosetsu, who tried to overthrow the Tokugawa government 
 in the seventeenth century, made a large kite on which he ascended 
 in order to spy on the Shogun's palace of Yedo. The Shogun and his 
 court were taken aback, and the construction of large kites was forth- 
 with forbidden under penalty of death. Shosetsu was subsequently 
 seized and compelled to commit harakiri. A famous brigand of the 
 seventeenth century, Ishikawa Goyemon, is said to have attempted 
 to steal the gold from the huge golden fish or dolphin on the tower of 
 the Castle of Nagoya by mounting on a kite. He succeeded in ab- 
 stracting three golden fins. Since that hime large kites have been 
 prohibited in Owari. Tametomo, of the Minamoto family, a hero of 
 the twelfth century, who lived in exile on Oshima Island, is said to 
 have sent his young son from there to Kamakura by means of an 
 enormous kite. There are other stories of valiant cavaliers who used 
 kites as airplanes by flying on them over the enemy's camp for 
 purposes of reconnaissance. 
 
 On September 24, 1927, the Associated Press reported by cable 
 from Constanza, Rumania, that while Robert M. Patterson, Ameri- 
 can Charge" d'affaires in Rumania, was motoring along the beach 
 on the Black Sea, he heard cries for help from a small naked boy 
 flying a huge kite which threatened to fly away with him or to pull 
 him into the sea. The frightened boy turned out to be five year old 
 King Michael, who, the dispatch said, despite his elevation to the 
 throne, cares more about kites than kingdoms. Mr. Patterson, who 
 knew Michael from babyhood, stopped his motor and ran to his 
 rescue. Taking the thick cord from the boy's blistered hands, he 
 pulled in the kite which was twice the size of the young king. It 
 required all his strength. "Don't tell my mother," whispered the 
 anxious monarch, "she will kill me, she doesn't know I'm out." Mr. 
 Patterson placed him in his car, and driving to Princess Helene's 
 residence, deposited the little king safely in the hands of his English 
 nurse. 
 
 Now if this or a similar story were found in a Chinese record, all 
 the gray-haired sinologues would shake their wise heads and de- 
 
Kites as Precursors of Aeroplanes 41 
 
 nounce it as an anecdote without a foundation of reality; but such 
 things will happen, and even more than that. 
 
 Athanasius Kircher was well posted on the subject of kites, and 
 in his work "Ars magna lucis" (Rome, 1646, p. 826) mentions the 
 fact that in his time kites were made of such dimensions that they 
 were capable of lifting a man. 
 
 The fact that it is not impossible to lift a person into the air by 
 means of two or several powerful kites combined may be inferred 
 from experiments made in England and America during the nine- 
 teenth century. About the year 1826 the principle of the kite was 
 turned to a practical purpose by George Pocock, a schoolmaster of 
 Bristol. Interested in kite-flying from the days of his boyhood, 
 Pocock found through various experiments that by attaching several 
 kites, one beneath another, they could be elevated above the clouds. 
 Then he attached to the cord of the kite a board which was dragged 
 along rapidly like a sledge, and next a car with a full load of passen- 
 gers was drawn easily over the turf. The first person who soared aloft 
 in the air by this invention was a lady, who, seated in an arm-chair, 
 was raised by the kite to a height of a hundred yards. Several years 
 later he developed this "aeropleustic art" (a term invented and used 
 by him alone) by constructing a four-wheeled carriage which he term- 
 ed "char-volant" (flying car). It was set in motion by two or more 
 large kites made to fold up and controlled as to angle and obliquity 
 by four lines. He demonstrated that two large kites with a surface 
 of a hundred square feet sent up in a gentle breeze had a draught 
 power of three hundredweight or nine hundredweight in a brisk gale. 
 On January 8, 1827, Pocock claimed to have covered several miles be- 
 tween Bristol and Marlborough at twenty miles an hour — a speed 
 which he remarks need not be thought dangerous — and that on this 
 occasion the London mail-coach was easily overtaken. Pocock pro- 
 posed also to apply kites to marine purposes for towing boats or 
 life-saving from shipwrecks on a lea shore, and suggested their mili- 
 tary use for elevating a man in reconnaissances and signalling — 
 which the Chinese had done centuries ago. Pocock's kite-chariot, of 
 course, was not a practicable scheme, as it depended on the winds, 
 but it has a decidedly Chinese flavor. In 1876 Joseph Simmons, it is 
 said, was drawn into the air to a height of six hundred feet or more 
 by means of two superposed kites, and then adjusting his weight by 
 means of guy lines glided down to earth. He filed a patent for his 
 invention (No. 2428, 1875) as "improved means and apparatus for 
 conveying or carrying human beings or objects into mid-air." In 
 
42 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 1868 Biot, a French engineer and a lifelong experimenter with kites, 
 was lifted from the ground by a large apparatus of this kind. In 1894 
 Captain B. F. S. Baden-Powell, of the Scots Guards, constructed a 
 kite 36 feet high consisting of four or five superposed kites, with 
 which he successfully lifted a man on different occasions to a height 
 of a hundred feet. In 1897 Lieutenant H. D. Wise made experiments 
 in the United States with large kites of the Hargrave type and suc- 
 ceeded in lifting a man forty feet above the ground. 
 
 It was Laurence Hargrave, an Australian, who then gave a fresh 
 impetus to scientific kite-flying. He realized that the structure best 
 adapted for a good kite would also be suitable as a basis for the struct- 
 ure of a flying-machine. He introduced a new principle and invented 
 what is known as the "cellular construction of kites." This is a kite 
 composed of two rectangular cells separated by a considerable 
 space — known as "the Hargrave box kite" (figured in National Geo- 
 graphic Magazine, 1903, p. 221). This type of kite, which surpassed 
 in stability all previous examples, formed the starting-point of Alex- 
 ander Graham Bell's epoch-making researches and his constructions 
 of triangular and tetrahedral kites. In 1903 Dr. Bell wrote, "I have 
 had the feeling that a properly constructed flying-machine should be 
 capable of being flown as a kite; and, conversely, that a properly 
 constructed kite should be capable of use as a flying-machine when 
 driven by its own propellers." 
 
 In December, 1907 Dr. Bell experimented with a gigantic man- 
 lifting kite, the Cygnet, more than forty feet long, which was sent up 
 both with and without a man. Lieutenant Selfridge, of the United 
 States Army, ascended with this kite to a height of 168 feet and re- 
 mained in the air for over seven minutes. Illustrations of these highly 
 interesting experiments may be viewed in the National Geographic 
 Magazine for 1908. 
 
 Dr. Bell's prophetic words uttered in 1903 have at present been 
 fulfilled. The wings of the modern biplane are closely patterned after 
 the Hargrave box-kite on which Dr. Bell inaugurated his experi- 
 ments. The man-lifting kite has developed into an airplane. The 
 speed plane of our times is but a first cousin to the kite. 
 
 Another Chinese apparatus deserves mention here, as it served as 
 a source of inspiration to Sir George Cayley (1774-1857), one of the 
 great pioneers of modern aviation. His interest in aeronautics was 
 aroused in boyhood by the invention of the balloon in 1783. He him- 
 
Kites as Precursors of Aeroplanes 43 
 
 self tells us that his first experiment in such matters was made as 
 early as 1796 with a Chinese or aerial top, which served at once to 
 illustrate the principle of the helicopter and the air-screw. Though 
 but a toy of a few inches in length, its capacity to demonstrate certain 
 elementary, but important principles in aeronautics made a lasting 
 impression on Cay ley's youthful mind, and only three years before 
 his death he sent to Dupuis Delcourt a drawing of one which he had 
 had made, the best he had ever seen, and capable of rising ninety feet 
 in the air. This drawing is reproduced in Hodgson's book (Fig. 135). 
 The original of one of these aerial tops is still in the possession of Mrs. 
 Thompson, a grand-daughter of Cayley. 
 
 o 
 
THE DAWN OF AIRSHIPS IN ANCIENT INDIA 
 
 Although the Aryan Indians of the Vedic period had numerous 
 aerial deities, like the Gandharvas, elfs haunting the "fathomless 
 spaces of air," no allusion is made in the Rigveda to their manner of 
 locomotion, and none is described as possessed of wings. Among the 
 divine steeds there is one named Dadhikra, praised for his swiftness, 
 speeding like the wind, and equipped with bird's wings; he is likened to 
 a swooping eagle and even directly called an eagle. The Vedic gods 
 did not fly, but preferred driving in luminous cars usually drawn by 
 fleet horses, in some cases by cows, goats, and spotted deer. Indra, 
 the favorite national god of the Vedic Indians, primarily a storm and 
 thunder-god, conqueror of the demons of drought and darkness, and 
 also a god of battle who aided the advancing Aryans in their struggle 
 against the Dasyus, the aboriginal inhabitants of India, is borne on a 
 golden chariot which is swifter than thought. This vehicle is drawn 
 by two or more tawny, sun-eyed chargers with flowing golden manes 
 and hair like peacocks' feathers. Snorting and neighing, they rapidly 
 traverse vast distances, and Indra is transported by them "as an 
 eagle is borne by its wings." His weapon is the thunderbolt (vajra), 
 which personifies the lightning stroke and with which he slays his 
 foes. A myth of post- Vedic times tells of quaking mountains pro- 
 vided with wings and gifted with the power of flight: they flew around 
 like birds, alighted wherever they pleased, and with their incessant 
 motion made the earth unsteady. With his thunderbolt Indra clipped 
 the wings of the restive mountains and settled them permanently in 
 their place; their wings were transformed into thunder clouds. 
 
 The Acvins ("horsemen"), twin deities, presumably symbolizing 
 the dawn and the morning star, travel in a sun-like chariot all parts 
 of which are golden and whose construction is based on the number 
 three, having three seats, triple wheels, and triple fellies. It moves 
 lightly, is swifter than "thought or the twinkling of an eye," and is 
 drawn by horses, but more commonly by birds, swans, eagles, or 
 eagle steeds. It touches the ends of heaven and extends over the five 
 countries, it races round heaven, and traverses heaven and earth 
 in a single day. They also have a car which without draught animals 
 traverses space. The Acvins are domiciled in heaven or in the air, 
 and appear at the time of the early dawn when they yoke their chariot 
 to descend to earth and receive the offering of worshippers. Ushas, 
 the maiden goddess of dawn, the most poetical figure of the Vedic 
 
 44 
 
The Dawn of Airships in Ancient India 45 
 
 pantheon, awakes the twin gods; she drives in a brilliant, well-adorn- 
 ed chariot drawn by ruddy steeds or kine. The Acvins follow Ushas 
 in their car, and thus their relative time seems to have been between 
 dawn and sunrise. The twin brothers have the particular function 
 of coming to the rescue of people in distress, and are constantly 
 praised for such deeds. The story most often referred to in the Rig- 
 veda is that of the deliverance of Bhujyu, son of Tugra, who was 
 abandoned in the midst of the ocean or in the water-cloud and who, 
 tossed about in darkness, invoked the succor of the youthful heroes. 
 They rescued him with animated, water-tight ships which traversed 
 the air (a sort of hydro-aeroplane), or with an animated winged boat 
 (compare Lana's flying ship, Plate V), or with three flying cars hav- 
 ing a hundred feet and six horses. The twins are wedded to the sun- 
 maiden or the daughter of the sun, and in the marriage rite they are 
 invoked to conduct the bride home in their chariot. 
 
 The Maruts, gods of the winds, children of the storm-cloud, born 
 from the laughter of lightning, speed in cars which gleam with light- 
 ning, drawn by spotted coursers; brilliant as fire, they carry spears on 
 their shoulders, anklets on their feet, golden ornaments on their 
 breasts, fiery lightnings in their hands, and golden helmets on their 
 heads. They are also described as having yoked the winds as steeds 
 to their pole; that is, their chariot is driven by the winds. 
 
 Surya, the sun god, the far-seeing spy of the whole world, who 
 beholds all beings and the good and bad deeds of mortals, moves in a 
 chariot drawn by one steed or by seven horses or mares. In various 
 passages, however, he is conceived as a bird traversing space, is rep- 
 resented as flying, and is compared with a flying eagle. The god 
 Agni, the personification of the sacrificial fire, which is the centre of 
 the ritual poetry of the Veda, drives in a lightning chariot, described 
 as golden and luminous, drawn by two or more horses impelled by 
 the wind. He yokes them to summon the gods to the sacrifice, and 
 then acts as their charioteer, bringing Indra from the sky, the Maruts 
 from the air. Agni is also likened to or directly designated a bird, 
 and in one passage is spoken of as the eagle of the sky. 
 
 Another Vedic god, Pushan, who is closely connected with the 
 sun, moves in golden ships sailing over the aerial ocean (the sky is 
 conceived as an ocean: thus, also, the Acvins' chariot approaches 
 from the celestial ocean), acting as messenger of Surya, the sun-god; 
 making his abode in heaven, he moves onward, beholding the uni- 
 verse. He is praised as the best of charioteers or air-pilots, and 
 drives with a pair of goats, presumably because the goat is a bold 
 
46 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 climber and appears fittest to clamber the dizzy heights of heaven. 
 The sun likewise appears as a boat in which Varuna, the god of the en- 
 compassing sky, navigates the aerial sea. This primitive conception 
 naturally arose from the experience of seeing the sun set in the ocean, 
 and being animated with a personality, he required a ship to guide 
 him out of the sea toward his path along the sky. On the one hand, 
 therefore, the sun functions as a charioteer, and is symbolized by the 
 horse and the wheel; on the other hand, as a boat and boatman: 
 Hence, in India, the idea of an airship developed from that of a solar 
 ship. Similar notions occur among other peoples. Re, the Egyptian 
 sun god, is the owner of two barks, changing from one to another in 
 the morning and evening. 
 
 Greek philosophers style the sun "boat-shaped," and Helios rides 
 in a golden boat from sunset to sunrise. In songs of the Letts the 
 setting sun must be rescued and taken in a boat to save his life; or 
 the sun sadly bewails the sinking of the golden ship into the sea, and 
 is consoled by the wish that God might build a new one. 
 
 In one of the Jatakas (No. 159) or stories of the Buddha's former 
 births, a king of Benares owns a jewelled car in which he used to race 
 through mid-air. Gunavarman (A.D. 367-431), a Buddhist monk 
 from India, sailed from Ceylon to Java, where he was to convert one 
 of the kings to Buddhism. A day prior to his landing in Java, the 
 king's mother had a dream to the effect that a religious friar had 
 embarked on a flying ship and would enter the kingdom ; on the fol- 
 lowing morning Gunavarman indeed arrived in person. In the pre- 
 lude to the fifth act of Bhavabhuti's drama Malatimadhava, a sor- 
 cerer's maid appears in "a chariot traversing the air." 
 
 In post-Vedic literature, the vehicle of the god Vishnu is Garuda, 
 the chief and lord of birds, a celestial bird, — originally a solar bird. 
 This purely mythological conception proved very fertile in stimu- 
 lating imagination and, according to Indian stories, led to construc- 
 tions of airships and attempts at flying. 
 
 The Panchatantra (I, 5), the most popular collection of Indian 
 folk-lore, contains the story of the Weaver as Vishnu. A weaver 
 became infatuated with the king's daughter; and his friend, a car- 
 penter, made for him a wooden airship in the shape of a Garuda, the 
 mythical bird and vehicle of the god Vishnu, which was set in motion 
 by means of a switch or spring. Equipped with all paraphernalia of 
 the god, the weaver mounted the machine; and when the carpenter 
 had explained to him how to manipulate the switch, he hopped off 
 
The Dawn of Airships in Ancient India 47 
 
 and dropped in on the seventh story of the palace, where the princess 
 had her apartment. Seeing him astride the Garuda in the splendor of 
 Vishnu's regalia, she took him for the creator of the three worlds, 
 and he married her instantly according to the rites of the Gandharva 
 marriage (i. e. by mutual consent, without ceremony), and then con- 
 tinued his relations with the princess for some time until her guards 
 suspected her and made a report to the king. He questioned her, but 
 her explanation that she is the consort of a god gratified his vanity. 
 Believing himself in alliance with Vishnu who would grant him the 
 rule over the world, the king became overbearing toward his neigh- 
 boring kings, who consequently made war on him. Through his 
 daughter he implored the pseudo- Vishnu to come to his rescue. This 
 one, in despair, appeared in the air above the battle-field, armed with 
 bow and arrow and ready to die; but Vishnu himself, fearing that 
 if the weaver disguised as Vishnu were killed his own authority among 
 men might suffer, entered into the weaver's body and scattered the 
 king's enemies. After the victory was obtained, the weaver descended 
 from the sky; and recognized by the king, his ministers and the 
 people, told the whole story, whereupon the king highly honored him, 
 solemnly married him to his daughter, and rewarded him with a large 
 estate. The most interesting point of this story is that the bird-plane 
 is utilized for military purposes to defeat and rout an army. When we 
 read that Abhayakara, a saint of the ninth century from Bengal, 
 assumed the form of a Garuda to disperse an army of Turushkas 
 (Turks), we must understand that he was mounted on a Garuda- 
 plane which functioned as a war-plane. 
 
 A dirigible airship is described in the celebrated old collection of 
 Indian stories known as "The Twenty-five Tales of a Vetala," which 
 is as well known in India as the Panchatantra and which was trans- 
 lated into Tibetan and Mongol ; it is usually quoted under its Mongol 
 title Siddhi Kiir. The heroes of this tale are six young men, — the son 
 of a rich man, a physician's son, a painter's son, a mathematician's 
 son, a carpenter's son, and the son of a smith, who leave home in 
 quest of adventure in a foreign land. The first of them won the hand 
 of a beautiful woman of divine origin, but she was soon kidnapped 
 by a powerful king who took her into his harem. The six youths 
 conspired to rescue the stolen wife from her captivity, and the car- 
 penter's son hit upon the scheme to construct a wooden bird, called 
 Garuda, whose interior was equipped with an elaborate apparatus 
 which allowed the machine to fly in various directions and to change 
 its course at will: it was provided with three springs. When the 
 
48 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 spring in front was touched, the aeroplane flew upward; when the 
 springs on the sides were tipped, it floated evenly along; when the 
 spring beneath was pressed, it made its descent. The painter's son 
 decorated the Garuda in various colors, so that it could not be dis- 
 tinguished from a real bird. The rich youth boarded the machine, 
 pressed the spring, and crossed the air in the direction of the king's 
 palace, where he soared above the roof. The king and his people 
 were amazed, for they had never before seen such a gigantic bird. 
 The king bade his consort to ascend the palace and offer food to the 
 strange visitor. So she did, and the bird descended. The aviator 
 opened the door of the machine, made himself known, seated his 
 former wife inside, and hopped off with her, navigating his way back 
 to his companions — in the same manner as we have all seen it in the 
 movies with modern airships. 
 
 In the Sanskrit version of the same story, as embodied in Soma- 
 deva's Katha Sarit Sagara ("Ocean of Streams of Stories"), an ex- 
 cellent Brahman, Harisvamin, has a beautiful daughter who wants 
 to marry only a man possessed of heroism and knowledge, or magic 
 power. The first suitor, thus informed, professed to command magic 
 power. At the father's request to demonstrate it, he immediately 
 constructed by his skill a chariot that would fly through the air, and 
 in a moment he took Harisvamin up in that magic chariot and showed 
 him heaven and all the world, and he brought him back delighted to 
 the camp of the king of the Deccan to whom he had been sent as an 
 ambassador to negotiate a treaty. Then Harisvamin promised his 
 daughter to that man possessed of supernatural power. His son pro- 
 mised her to a man skilful in the use of missiles and hand-to-hand 
 weapons, and his wife promised her to a man who professed to have 
 supernatural knowledge. When the three bridegrooms appeared on 
 the wedding day in Harisvamin's house, it happened that the in- 
 tended bride had disappeared in some inexplicable manner. The 
 possessor of knowledge soon found out that an ogre (Rakshasa) had 
 carried her off to his habitation in the Vindhya forest. The possessor 
 of magic power prepared, as previously, a chariot that would fly 
 through the air, provided with all kinds of weapons. Harisvamin, 
 the man of knowledge, and the brave man jumped into the airship 
 with him. In a moment they were carried to the Rakshasa's dwelling- 
 place. The giant was duly slain by the brave man, the Brahman's 
 daughter was released, and they all returned home in the flying chariot. 
 
 A fundamental document referring to airships is found in Bu- 
 dhasvamin's Brihat Katha, Clokasamgraha (edited and translated into 
 
The Dawn of Airships in Ancient India 49 
 
 French by F. Lacote, 1908), a collection of stories written during the 
 eleventh century. Vasavadatta desired to mount an aerial chariot 
 and thus to visit the entire earth. Vasantaka, the master of games, 
 exclaimed laughingly, "The wives of the king's servants had just the 
 same craving. I said to all, 'Suspend a swing with long poles, mount 
 it, and you will ascend into the air. Your husbands do not know of 
 any other way of satisfying your desire.' If she had a notion to travel 
 through the air, she must be content with the same medium." All 
 burst out laughing. "Stop joking, and come to the point," Rumanvat 
 said. "What good is it to dream thereof?" Yaugandharayana 
 spoke, "This is exclusively an affair of artisans." Rumanvat sum- 
 moned the carpenters and enjoined them to make without delay a 
 machine capable of traversing the air. After a long deliberation 
 these said frightened and stammering, "We know only four kinds of 
 machines, but as regards flying-machines, they are known only to 
 the Yavanas (the Greeks), but we never had occasion to see them." 
 
 Farther on, in the same story, Vicvila mounts a mechanical 
 cock and makes a trip through the air. At his return he speaks to the 
 king's ambassadors thus: "It is not proper to reveal to any one, arti- 
 san or any other person, the secret of the aerial machines, which is 
 difficult to obtain for whoever is not a Yavana (a Greek). It is the 
 same matter as the secret of the manufacture of beds; if it leaks out, 
 it would become common property, and the public would treat it 
 with disdain, for fashion is the creation of the moment. To bring 
 this respectable art into disfavor is a grave sin, so let us drop this 
 matter." A month later Pukvasaka, a clever carpenter and crafts- 
 man, said to Vicvila, who was his son-in-law, "The king took me 
 aside to-day and told me with a gentle smile that I must reveal to 
 him this science of aerial machines. I replied that I did not reveal it to 
 you, but that it was Greek artisans with whom you had curried favor. 
 The king waxed angry and threatened my life. Save my life and my 
 sons, therefore, by revealing to the king the secret of these machines, 
 since it is his desire!" Vicvila consented, but during the night awa- 
 kened his sleeping wife, Ratnavali, and said, "I have to inform you 
 that I am returning to my country. Your father employs intrigues 
 to banish me from this place: he wants to wrest from me the secret 
 of the flying-machines which it is our duty to keep concealed, as a 
 miser guards his treasure. But enough, it is my life or your father 
 who is dear to you. In order to guard my secret, I shall go so far as to 
 forsake you!" He and his wife mounted the machine in the form of a 
 cock, and during the night made an ascent and escaped into the 
 
50 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 country whence he had come.... The commander-in-chief assembled 
 all the artisans, gave them a flogging, and ordered them to construct 
 a flying-machine. Meanwhile a stranger appeared and said, "I shall 
 construct the machine for you; do not flog the artisans! Give me 
 immediately the necessary appliances." These were at once furnished 
 by Rumanvat. One of the artisans said to the stranger, "Ask the 
 commander-in-chief for the number of passengers. Because they 
 did not know how many passengers they could transport, kings saw 
 their chariot sink, and more than one artisan, it is said, has therefore 
 suffered their wrath." The other responded, "These must have been 
 wretched village artisans! But it is of no avail to waste so many 
 words. Wait a moment!" In the nick of time he produced a flying 
 chariot in the form of a Garuda, adorned with Mandara flowers, and 
 said to the king, "Oh king, Vishnu of the kings, mount the Garuda 
 and traverse the earth formerly traversed by Vishnu!" "Madam," 
 the king said to the queen, "what do you tarry now? Mount this 
 chariot and depart in accordance with your wish!" "My consort," 
 she responded, "without you I do not even go into the garden; with- 
 out you, how could I support myself in the vacuum of the celestial 
 space?" The king reported these words to the craftsman, who ex- 
 claimed, "But this chariot can carry the entire city!" Thereupon the 
 king took his seat in the chariot together with the personnel of the 
 harem, his wives, his officials, and a section of each urban corporation. 
 They gained the pure spaces of the firmament, and finally took the 
 route of the winds. The chariot circumambulated the earth girt by 
 the ocean, and then was directed toward the city of the Avantis, 
 where the festival of the offering of the water was held. The machine 
 was stopped, so that the king might enjoy the spectacle. After a 
 brief stay the king departed for Kaugambi under the eyes of the 
 multitude which admired the chariot, and acquitted himself of his 
 obligations toward the immortals, the priests, the sacred fires, his 
 parents, his servants and burghers. Then he commanded to do 
 honors to the craftsman. 
 
 In a Sanskrit romance, the Harshacharita ("Deeds of King Har- 
 sha"), written by Bana in the seventh century, mention is made of a 
 king, Kakavarna. Being desirous of marvels, he was carried away, 
 no one knows whither, on an artificial aerial car made by a Yavana 
 (Greek) who had been taken prisoner. The term used in this passage 
 means literally, "a mechanical vehicle (yantrayana) which travels on 
 the surface of the air;" that is, an airship. 
 
The Dawn of Airships in Ancient India 51 
 
 From the preceding texts it follows that the Indians profess to 
 have had two distinct types of flying-machines, — the Garuda airship 
 of native manufacture constructed on the principle of bird-flight, and 
 the Yavana airship ascribed to the Yavanas or Greeks, the manu- 
 facture of which was scrupulously guarded as a secret. 
 
 The first question to be raised is, Did the ancient Indians really 
 navigate the air? Are their dirigibles realities or fiction, merely the 
 upshot of a poetic imagination? To my way of thinking this point is 
 irrelevant. The main point is: they had the idea; and their ideas 
 about aeronautics were not worse or more defective than those enter- 
 tained in Europe from the sixteenth to the first part of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 The Indians saw two points clearly — that aircraft must operate 
 on the principle of the flight of birds and that a mechanism is required 
 to start the machine, to keep it in mid-air, and to make a descent. 
 Whether they actually flew or not, whether they succeeded or failed, 
 the stories cited (and another will be given below) are sufficient evi- 
 dence of the fact that they devoted considerable thought to problems 
 of the air and aeronautics and that as a sequel of a highly developed 
 mechanical science efforts were made to construct aircraft of various 
 types. 
 
 The second query that we may revolve in our mind is, Did the 
 Greeks, as asserted by the Indians, really supply them with flying- 
 machines? A direct response to this inquiry is not forthcoming from 
 the Greek camp. The Greek mechanicians, in the ingenuity of their 
 inventions perhaps the greatest of all times, are silent as to aircraft. 
 Perhaps the information is lost; for myself I see nothing impossible 
 in the assumption that the Greeks of the Alexandrian epoch should 
 have made successful experiments in mechanical flights. 
 
 Greek mechanics and artisans enjoyed a high reputation in India, 
 and marvellous inventions were ascribed to them. The Indians have 
 numerous stories of wonderful automata set in motion by intricate 
 machinery; for instance, movable figures of beautiful women who 
 may even assume life, tempt men and cause a quarrel among them, 
 wooden figures of men able to strut, sing and dance, artificial ele- 
 phants moving by means of a mechanical apparatus, or artificial 
 fishes which appear to swim under a floor of rock-crystal looking 
 like water. It is noteworthy, again, that in some tales such mechani- 
 cal marvels are attributed to the Greeks; thus, a painter from central 
 India once travelled on business to the land of the Greeks (Yavana), 
 and took up his abode in the house of a mechanician who made an arti- 
 
52 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 ficial maiden to wait upon the painter. She washed his feet and then 
 stood still; he called to her to draw near, but she .made no reply. He 
 seized her by the hand, and when he tried to embrace her, the figure 
 collapsed and turned into a heap of chips. In another tale, an Indian 
 carver in ivory travels to the land of the Greeks and settles in the 
 house of a Greek painter. The great mechanicians of Alexandria 
 were very proficient in the construction of mechanical toys and 
 figures, and we still have Heron's work on the Automatic Theatre 
 (Automatopoietika), written in the second century before our era. 
 Heron was the founder of a school, surveyor, mechanician, and the 
 greatest physicist of ancient times. 
 
 Maybe, because so many wonders of technique were created by 
 the Greeks, the poets of India reasoned that aircraft also must have 
 been due to their genius. We do not know, but what we do know at 
 present is that in the records of ancient Indian lore are distinguished 
 two types of flying apparatus — the native Garuda airship and the im- 
 ported Yavana airship. Here remains a fascinating problem which 
 more abundant documentary material that may come to light in 
 the future will help us solve. 
 
 As regards winged flight, only one example is known to me from 
 Indian literature. The Katha Sarit Sagara ("Ocean of Streams of 
 Stories") contains the following good tale: "Once upon a time there 
 was a young Brahman who one day beheld a prince of the Siddhas 
 flying through the air. Wishing to rival him, he fastened to his sides 
 wings of grass, and continually leaping up, he tried to learn the art 
 of flying in the air. As he continued to make this useless attempt 
 every day, he was at last seen by the prince while he was roaming 
 through the air. The prince thought, 'I ought to take pity on this 
 boy who shows spirit in struggling earnestly to attain an impossible 
 object, for it is my duty to patronize such.' Thereupon, being pleased, 
 he took the Brahman boy, by his magic power, upon his shoulder, and 
 made him one of his followers." In Indian art, particularly in the 
 sculpture of the Buddhists, winged beings in the act of flying are 
 frequently represented, and such types like the Apsarases and Kin- 
 naras have also been adopted by the Chinese. Plate X illustrates 
 a fine Chinese marble sculpture from the Blackstone Chinese Col- 
 lection of the Museum: two Apsarases or heavenly nymphs are flying 
 down from Indra's celestial abode to guard the Buddha Amitabha. 
 
 I shall not dwell at length on the alleged power of flightacquired 
 by magical practices or witchcraft, first taught in the Yoga system 
 
The Dawn of Airships in Ancient India 53 
 
 and from it transplanted into Buddhism. Among the marvellous 
 abilities promised as a reward of Yoga practice there were under- 
 standing of the speech of animals, assuming any shapes, resuscitating 
 the dead, descent into the inferno, fast locomotion, penetrating every- 
 where as air does, being poised cross-legged in the air, and traversing 
 the air. What has been observed of "flying" among the modern 
 Yogins proved to be walking or hopping close to the surface of the 
 ground without seemingly touching it. A few examples from Bud- 
 dhist literature may suffice. 
 
 In a Buddhistic story entitled The Magician's Pupil (Schiefner- 
 Ralston, Tibetan Tales, p. 288) a man of the Chandala caste (the 
 lowest and most despised Pariah class) is versed in spells and magic 
 lore, and obtains by means of spells from the Gandhamadana moun- 
 tain fruits and flowers as are not in season, and these he presents to 
 the king. A Brahman youth becomes his pupil, and when taught the 
 art of magic, immediately makes a trial of his art on the spot and 
 soars into the sky, reaching the fabulous mountain where he plucks 
 fruits and flowers. 
 
 In one of the Jatakas (No. 186) is mentioned a gem endowed with 
 magic power and capable of raising into the air whoever holds it in 
 his mouth. By his own miraculous power the Buddha is able to rise 
 in the air, to be poised in mid-air, and to travel through the air 
 wherever it pleases him. 
 
 What is more interesting are two charming motifs of folk-lore 
 presented by India to the world — the magic boots and the enchanted 
 horse. 
 
 The Katha Sarit Sagara contains the following tale (in the trans- 
 lation of C. H. Tawney): — 
 
 "King Putraka, faithful to his promise, entered the impassable 
 wilds of the Vindhya, disgusted with his relations. As he wandered 
 about, he saw two heroes engaged heart and soul in a wrestling 
 match, and he asked them who they were. They replied, 'We are the 
 two sons of the Asura Maya, and his wealth belongs to us, — this 
 vessel, this stick, and these shoes; it is for these that we are fighting 
 and whichever of us proves the mightier is to take them/ When he 
 heard this speech of theirs, Putraka said with a smile, 'That is a fine 
 inheritance for a man!' Then they said, 'By putting on these shoes 
 one gains the power of flying through the air; whatever is written 
 with this staff turns out true; and whatever food a man wishes to 
 have in the vessel is found there immediately.' When he heard this, 
 Putraka said, 'What is the use of fighting? Make this agreement, 
 
54 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 that whoever proves the best man in running shall possess this 
 wealth.' Those simpletons said, 'Agreed,' and set off to run, while 
 the prince put on the shoes and flew up in the air, taking with him 
 the staff and the vessel. Then he went a great distance in a short 
 time and saw beneath him a beautiful city named Akarshika and 
 descended into it from the sky. Subsequently the king fell in love 
 withthe daughter of a king, and one night flew up through the air to 
 the window of her room by the aid of his magic shoes. Later on he 
 eloped with her by taking her in his arms and flying away through 
 the air, finally descending from heaven near the banks of the Ganges." 
 
 This story is also extant in a Chinese translation (S. Julien, Ava- 
 danas, No. 34, and E. Chavannes, Cinq cent contes, Vol. II, p. 185), 
 and has likewise migrated to Europe (Grimm, Marchen, No. 92, 
 where the three wondrous objects are almost identical). 
 
 The legends of later Buddhist saints, as related in Tibetan records, 
 frequently mention a "swift-foot apparatus" for rapid locomotion. 
 In one case we are informed that such boots were made of the leaves 
 of trees, the underlying idea apparently being that they should be as 
 light in weight as possible. The owner of this footgear was the saint 
 Vararuchi who had obtained it by virtue of magic spells; whenever 
 he donned it, he was able to penetrate into the abodes of gods and 
 serpent-demons (Nagas) and to abstract many treasures with which 
 he delighted the hearts of the poor. Once he had a quarrel with the 
 king who suspected him of using evil spells against his life and who 
 sent a messenger to do away with him. Vararuchi put on his magic 
 boots and fled to the city Ujjayini. The king employed a woman 
 to trick him out of his boots, and when unable to flee, he was over- 
 powered by the royal henchman. 
 
 The thousand-league boots are well known to European folk-lore; 
 they belong, for instance, to the equipment of the ogre in the tale of 
 Petit Poucet. 
 
 In a Swedish story entitled "The Beautiful Palace East of the 
 Sun and North of the Earth" a youth acquires boots by means of 
 which he can travel a hundred miles at every step, and a cloak that 
 renders him invisible in a very similar way. 
 
 A recipe for making magic boots is thus given in an Icelandic 
 story: "A giant told a woman that Hermodr was in a certain desert 
 island which he named to her; but could not get her thither unless 
 she flayed the soles of her feet and made shoes for herself out of the 
 skin; and these shoes, when made, would be of such a nature that they 
 would take her through the air, or over the water, as she liked." 
 
The Dawn of Airships in Ancient India 55 
 
 The enchanted horse of later Indian folk-lore is doubtless evolved 
 from the solar horse of early Vedic mythology. From India this 
 motif spread westward and was adopted into the Arabian Nights 
 and many other collections of stories. In the Nights the flying horse, 
 made of ebony, can perform in a single day a journey which under 
 normal conditions would take a year; for the purpose of making the 
 horse descend it is necessary to rub the switch on its left shoulder. 
 
 In an Armenian story of Persian origin, entitled "Solomon's 
 Garden and Its Mysteries," Giil, a servant of Solomon, possesses two 
 wonderful steeds, — the horse of the wind and the horse of the clouds, 
 which Solomon had bequeathed to him. The cloud-horse was not 
 so fleet, but always followed in the track of the wind-horse. 
 
 In a collection of Jaina stories (Samyaktvakaumudi) it is narrated 
 that Samudradatta was a groom in the service of a horse-dealer and 
 received from him in compensation two horses which he was allowed 
 to choose himself. He won the love of his master's daughter at whose 
 advice he picked two ill-shaped horses: one of these was capable of 
 running through the air, the other was able to go through water. 
 On the air horse he returned home together with his wife. 
 
 In Jataka No 196 the Bodhisatva comes into the world as a 
 flying horse, white all over and with a beak like that of a crow, pos- 
 sessed of supernatural power, able to fly through the air. From the 
 Himalaya he made a non-stop flight to Ceylon. There he passed over 
 the ponds and tanks of the island and lived on wild-growing rice. 
 Then he took back a number of ship-wrecked traders who had fallen 
 into the hands of flesh-devouring ogres, — some climbing up on his 
 back, some laying hold of his tail, — and conveyed all of them to 
 their own country, and set down each in his own place. 
 
 The collection of stories known as "The Thirty-two Tales of the 
 Lion-throne" or "Tales of King Vikramaditya" contains the account 
 of an air-journey on an enchanted horse (No. 8), treated very much 
 like the Garuda airships aforementioned, and is remarkable for the 
 vividness of impressions received by the traveller in the air. 
 
 A carpenter once appeared before a king, leading a wooden horse 
 richly caparisoned and in every respect looking like a live animal. 
 The king did not think much of it, except that it was a clever model 
 of a horse as any workman could accomplish, when the carpenter 
 called his majesty's attention to the mechanical apparatus in the 
 interior, which would allow him to reach any place he wished in a 
 few moments. The king, who was interested in every uncommon 
 thing and had never before seen a mechanical contrivance of such 
 
56 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 wonderful make, bade the carpenter to mount the horse. In an in- 
 stant the man was seated on its back, and before any one had time 
 to notice what he did in setting the machine in motion, both horse 
 and rider had flown up and vanished. In a quarter of an hour he 
 alighted on the ground, guiding his horse to the foot of the throne, 
 and dismounted. When the king had seen the amazing speed at 
 which the horse could fly through the air, he was seized by the ardent 
 desire to possess the magical steed and paid the carpenter a large 
 sum for it (two lakhs of rupees; that is, two hundred thousand rupees). 
 The following evening the king mounted the hippoplane, and 
 turning the starting switch, took to the air and was out of sight in a 
 moment. The rapid movement took the king by surprise: he felt 
 dizzy and saw nothing around him but blue ether, wishing he had 
 never made the ascent. For an hour he continued to rise higher and 
 higher till the mountains below could not be distinguished from the 
 plains, and in a moment all earthly landmarks passed out of sight. 
 Then he thought it was time to descend, and imagined that all he 
 had to do was to turn the same switch in the opposite direction, but 
 to his horror he found that, turn as he might, he did not at all change 
 his course. In his impatience to acquire the horse he had forgotten to 
 inquire how to descend to earth. He set about to examine the horse's 
 neck, till at last he discovered a tiny switch close to the right ear. 
 This he turned and the next moment found himself dropping down 
 toward the earth, somewhat more slowly than he had ascended. It 
 was dark, and as he was unable to see, he was fain to allow the horse 
 to take his own course. It so happened that the machine struck 
 against the top of a tree, and the king, bruised and bleeding, fell to 
 the ground, but escaped serious injury. He had landed in a dense 
 jungle, where he discovered an enchanted princess with whom he 
 fell in love. 
 
 It is interesting to note his experiences in the air, as he relates 
 them to the princess: "In an instant I was soaring much faster than 
 the speed of an arrow, and I felt I was approaching the sky so closely 
 that I should soon hit my head against it. I could discern nothing 
 beneath me, nothing around me save the invisible air, and for some 
 time I was so confused that I did not know in what direction I was 
 travelling. At last when it grew dark, I found a second switch near 
 the horse's right ear, and on turning it, I began slowly to sink toward 
 the earth. I was forced to trust to chance, content to abide by what- 
 ever my destiny had in store for me, and it was just midnight when 
 finally I found myself landed safely on firm ground. I soon dis- 
 
The Dawn of Airships in Ancient India 57 
 
 covered that I was in the midst of a forest, and passed the remaining 
 hours of the night among the branches of a tree. I thank the tree for 
 having afforded me the means of discovering this palace, and still 
 more, of discovering you." 
 
 Finally the king escaped with the princess, mounting the magic 
 horse and seating the princess on a pillion behind him, and when she 
 was firmly seated with her hands holding tightly to his belt, he 
 touched the button, and the horse began to ascend heavenward like 
 a rocket. They raced through the atmosphere like a flash of lightning, 
 and the king, now an experienced air-pilot, guided his horse so skil- 
 fully that in a few hours the temples and towers of Ujjain appeared 
 beneath the horse's feet. They alighted outside the city gate and 
 walked to the royal palace. 
 
FROM BABYLON AND PERSIA TO THE 
 GREEKS AND THE ARABS 
 
 The earliest traditions of the Euphrates Valley carry us back to a 
 mythical age in which rulers are pictured as deities or of divine de- 
 scent. Among these is the legendary sovereign, Etana, a shepherd, 
 who is the hero of various tales of which large fragments, though not 
 all, have been recovered. This is not the place for a discussion of the 
 entire myth. An eagle has a struggle with a serpent who badly tears 
 his wings and feathers, and leaves him in a mountain-pit to die. 
 The eagle appeals to Etana to release him from his prison, and as a 
 reward promises to fly with Etana to the dwelling of the gods. Etana 
 mounts on the back of the eagle, and together they fly upward. 
 They reach the heaven of Anu and halt at the gate of the ecliptic. 
 At this point there is a gap in the narrative, and when the thread is 
 taken up, the eagle urges Etana to continue the journey in order to 
 reach the place where Ishtar (the planet Venus) dwells. As in the 
 case of the first flight, a distance of three kasbu or six hours is covered. 
 Whether at this point the eagle's strength becomes exhausted or 
 whether the goddess herself intervenes, the precipitous descent be- 
 gins. The eagle drops through the space of three double hours and 
 reaches the ground. The close of the story is wanting, but clearly 
 the purpose of the flight has failed. 
 
 It seems that there is no other myth relating to a flight preserved 
 in cuneiform literature, and G. Hiising is probably right in evaluating 
 the Etana myth, together with many others preserved in Babylonian 
 records, as non-Babylonian and hailing from the Caucasus region. 
 Be this as it may, the Etana myth is Aryan, not Semitic, and may 
 also be derived from Iran. 
 
 A Babylonian seal cylinder, which is preserved in the Berlin Mu- 
 seum, represents the story of Etana, the flyer. He is shown being 
 carried on an eagle's back, soaring between heaven and earth. The 
 crescent of the moon is to his left, the sun to his right. A man stand- 
 ing on the ground looks up at the strange spectacle in amazement, 
 and two dogs bark at the flying pair. On the left side of the seal 
 impression appears a flock of sheep in a fold, guarded by a shepherd — 
 obviously the herd belonging to Etana. The British Museum owns 
 another seal illustrating the same subject: here Etana is seated on the 
 eagle, who is bearing his burden aloft in the sight of an admiring and 
 upward-gazing dog. See, further, note on p. 91. 
 
 58 
 
From Babylon and Persia to the Greeks and the Arabs 59 
 
 An ancient Persian tradition is of especial interest, as it was 
 transmitted to Europe at an early date and exerted no small influence 
 on those occupied with dreams of aviation. This story forms a 
 chapter of its own, and its fate will be traced down to recent times. 
 
 In the ancient semi-legendary history of Iran, Kavi Usan (in 
 Persian : Kai Kawus) is the second king of the dynasty of the Kaia- 
 nians. He was not a wise ruler, but was a rather imperfect character, 
 easily led astray by passion. He ascended Mount Alburz, where he 
 built seven palaces, one of gold, two of silver, two of steel, and two of 
 rock-crystal. He then endeavored to restrain the demons of Mazan- 
 daran. One of these evil spirits retaliated by a ruse and sowed in his 
 heart the seeds of discontent with his sovereignty on earth, so that he 
 set his mind on aiming at the supremacy of the celestial abode. 
 Yielding to the temptation of the Evil One, he seated himself on a 
 throne which was supported and raised by four eagles, and as an 
 incentive to fly up four pieces of flesh were fastened to the top of four 
 spears planted on the sides of the throne. In this manner he sought 
 to be transported into the empyrean; but the flight was of brief dura- 
 tion: the strange vehicle soon came down in a crash, and the grandees 
 found the king unconscious in a forest. 
 
 In his great epic poem, the Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"), Fir- 
 dausi (935-1025) describes this event as follows (in the translation of 
 Warner) : — 
 
 The Shah mused how to roam the air though wingless, 
 
 And often asked the wise, "How far is it 
 
 From earth to moon?" The astrologers replied. 
 
 He chose a futile and perverse device: 
 
 He bade men scale the aeries while the eagles 
 
 Were sleeping, take a number of the young, 
 
 And keep a bird or two in every home. 
 
 He had those eaglets fed a year and more 
 
 With fowl, kabab, and at some whiles with lamb. 
 
 When they were strong as lions and could each 
 
 Bear off a mountain-sheep, he made a throne 
 
 Of aloe from Komor (Khmer) with seats of gold. 
 
 He bound a lengthy spear at every corner, 
 
 Suspended a lamb's leg from every spear-head, 
 
 Brought four strong eagles, tied them to the throne, 
 
 And took his seat, a cup of wine before him. 
 
 The swift-winged eagles, ravenous for food, 
 
 Strove lustily to reach the flesh, and raising 
 
 The throne above earth's surface bore it cloudward. 
 
 Kawus, as I have heard, essayed the sky 
 
 To outsoar angels, but another tale 
 
 Is that he rose in this way to assail 
 
 The heaven itself with his artillery. 
 
 The legend hath its other versions too; 
 
 None but the All-wise wotteth which is true. 
 
 Long flew the eagles, but they stopped at last, 
 
60 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 Like other slaves of greed. They sulked exhausted, 
 
 They dropped their sweating wings and brought the Shah, 
 
 His spears and throne down from the clouds to earth, 
 
 Alighting in a forest near Amul. 
 
 The world preserved him by a miracle, 
 
 But hid its secret purposes therein. 
 
 Instead of sitting on his throne in might 
 
 His business then was penitence and travail. 
 
 He tarried in the wood in shame and grief, 
 
 Imploring from Almighty God relief. 
 
 An illustrated Persian manuscript of the Shahnameh, dated 1587- 
 88, which is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New 
 York, vividly depicts this aerial flight (Plate XI). The ambitious 
 Shah clad in a pink robe, with feathered turban, is seated on a green 
 mat spread on the bottom of a yellow hexagonal couch, holding a 
 bow in his left hand and an arrow in his right, a fully laden quiver 
 resting in front of him. He is ready for an attack from the air at any 
 price against any enemy who might dare oppose his will. Four black 
 eagles, on the wing, are harnessed to the sides of the throne, eagerly 
 looking up and striving toward the flesh tied to four spears with 
 fluttering red flags. The flyers are soaring in yellow and black clouds 
 set off from the blue ether, leaving beneath them the highest moun- 
 tain top from which a goat and another animal gaze at them in 
 bewilderment. 
 
 This Iranian motif of an aerial conveyance lifted by starved 
 eagles, like many other Oriental motifs, was adopted by the Greek 
 Romance of Alexander the Great, which during the middle ages was 
 translated into most European languages and thus became widely 
 known. I quote from Dunlop's classical book "History of Fiction." 
 Having reached the extremity of the world, having received homage 
 from all nations who inhabit its surface, and being assured that there 
 remained nothing more to conquer, Alexander formed the inconsid- 
 erate project of becoming sovereign of the air and deep. By the 
 conjurations of the eastern professors of magic, whom ne consulted, 
 he was furnished with a glass cage of enormous dimensions, yoked 
 with eight griffins well matched. Having seated himself in this con- 
 veyance, he posted through the empire of the air, accompanied by 
 magicians, who understood the language of birds, and asked of the 
 most intelligent natives the proper questions concerning their laws, 
 manners, and customs, while Alexander received their voluntary sub- 
 missions. So far Dunlop. The common version of the story is that 
 the birds of prey were first starved for three days and then put to a 
 carriage, while a horse-liver was stuck on a spit in front of them. 
 Greedy for the flesh, the birds drew the vehicle and in it Alexander up 
 
From Babylon and Persia to the Greeks and the Arabs 61 
 
 into the air until a bird with human face met him and bade him return 
 to earth. Dunlop has justly remarked, "This aerial journey, like 
 most of the fictions concerning Alexander, is of eastern origin. An 
 old Arabian writer, in a book called Malem, informs us that Nimrod 
 being frustrated in his attempt to build the tower of Babel, insisted 
 on being carried through the air in a cage borne by four monstrous 
 birds." Mediaeval miniatures illustrating this air voyage show Alex- 
 ander with full regalia seated in a palanquin impelled by sixteen 
 gryphons. 
 
 Francis Godwin (1562-1633), bishop of Hereford, wrote a ro- 
 mance entitled " The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage 
 Thither by Domingo Gonsales the Speedy Messenger," first pub- 
 lished in 1638 after his death. In this story Gonsales, on account of 
 sickness during a voyage, is abandoned on the then uninhabited 
 island St. Helena, and passes his time by training a number of wild 
 swans to obey his call and gradually to carry small burdens while 
 flying. He conceived the idea of harnessing several birds together 
 and devised a mechanism whereby the difficulty of distributing the 
 weight equally at the start of the flight might be overcome. With 
 a team of seven birds Gonsales experimented on a lamb, and by in- 
 creasing their number to about twenty-five, he was himself carried 
 aloft to his great satisfaction. "For I hold it far more honor," he 
 says, "to have been the first flying man than to be another Neptune 
 that first adventured to sail upon the sea." On his return to Spain 
 Gonsales was saved from shipwreck by his birds, who subsequently 
 flew with him to the moon — a journey which lasted eleven days. He 
 finally learned that the birds he had trained were not really denizens 
 of St. Helena, but of the moon. "The Man in the Moone" had a 
 considerable influence on literature. Swift is said to have derived 
 from it the idea of the flying island in Gulliver's Travels (1727). 
 Several features of Godwin's romance were borrowed by Capt. Sam- 
 uel Brunt in his "A Voyage to Cacklogallinia," which recounts ad- 
 ventures among a nation of bird-men and a voyage to the moon. 
 The frontispiece to this book shows the voyager conveyed through 
 the air on a palanquin supported by four large birds — the same con- 
 ception as found in the Shahnameh (Plate XII). 
 
 Hodgson adds the following interesting comment to Godwin's 
 romance: "Godwin's name is now seldom remembered save by 
 scholars . . , but his name deserves to be kept in remembrance in 
 aeronautical history. For though flight had been an aspiration and 
 an object of achievement long before Godwin's time, the idea that 
 
62 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 'the first flying man' would be greatly deserving of honor, finds its 
 earliest expression in the sentiments above quoted. Moreover, that 
 ingenious pioneer of flight, Domingo Gonsales, though an imaginary 
 creation, is inspired with an admirable spirit of enthusiasm for aerial 
 adventure of a kind that has since inspired a countless succession 
 of real pioneers in aeronautical endeavor. To suggest that Godwin's 
 book created that spirit would be to press the point unduly — the 
 motif of a first success has ever been a strong one, and one which 
 usually predicates the impulse of enthusiasm." 
 
 In April, 1786 M. Uncles announced that he was constructing a 
 balloon to be drawn by "four harnessed eagles, perfectly tame, and 
 capable of flying in every direction at their master's will." In May he 
 disclosed that nothing prevented an ascent save the unsettled 
 weather, the birds being "well-practiced." The trial was deferred, 
 however, until August when the eagles were ready on the ground at 
 Ranelagh, the inflation proved a fiasco, and the balloon did not 
 rise from even the ground. 
 
 In July, 1835 Thomas Simmons Mackintosh proposed a scheme 
 by which balloons may be conducted in moderate weather with safety 
 by having a sufficient number of larger birds, such as hawks — eagles 
 would do better if they could be tamed, but perhaps strong pigeons 
 would do very well, — and let them be harnessed to the balloon to draw 
 it along. In a "sketch of an aerial ship" Mackintosh shows his bal- 
 loon formed like the hull of a ship with an additional frame-work 
 keel on either side of which are "harnessed" eight eagles, immediately 
 controlled or "driven" by the aeronauts seated in a small car between 
 the two keels. A colored reproduction of this airship is contained in 
 Hodgson's book (Fig. 113). 
 
 J. Kaiserer published in 1801 at Vienna a pamphlet on his inven- 
 tion to direct an air balloon through eagles ("Ueber meine Erfindung 
 einen Luftballon durch Adler zu regieren"). A plate depicts the 
 inventor in his balloon driving (as it were) a pair of harnessed eagles. 
 The same idea was revived in France in 1845, and as it has been 
 demonstrated, this idea has its root in an ancient Persian tradition 
 transmitted to Europe through the medium of the Romance of Alex- 
 ander the Great. 
 
 Daedalus ("Cunning Worker") was an ingenious craftsman of an 
 inventive turn of mind; he is the representative of the mechanical 
 arts of the later Minoan age. While in the service of Minus, king of 
 Crete, he built the labyrinth for the confinement of the Minotaur, but 
 
From Babylon and Persia to the Greeks and the Arabs 63 
 
 incurred the king's wrath; and to escape imprisonment, he fashioned 
 a pair of artificial wings coated with wax for himself and his son 
 Icarus. Thus they fled and flew westward across the sea. The father 
 enjoined his son not to fly too low lest the wings dip in the brine and 
 the wax which held them together be softened, nor too high, lest the 
 heat of the sun melt the wax. Icarus disregarded the paternal ad- 
 monition, came too near the sun in his lofty flight, the wax which 
 fastened the wings to his shoulders melted, and he fell headlong into 
 the sea which is still named for him the Icarian Sea. The more cau- 
 tious Daedalus landed safely on Sicily. Of all flying stories of classical 
 antiquity it is this one which has left a lasting impression on future 
 generations and fired the ambition of many imitators; and it is on 
 this point, its moral effect, that the importance of the story rests. 
 Daedalus was an historical personage, a many-sided artisan who 
 surely made some attempts to fly. Like many others of his type he 
 was not understood or even was misunderstood by his contem- 
 poraries, and his story has been handed down in the form of poetic 
 romance and exaggerated legend. 
 
 And what, after all, is the difference whether the Daedalus story 
 is true or not? It is not the gray, cold, naked objective truth that 
 counts in the history of mankind and will advance the cause of civili- 
 zation, but it is the flight of human imagination, the impulses and 
 visions of a genius, very often his errors and miscalculations, which 
 have stimulated inventions and progress. Ever since Daedalus' al- 
 leged or real flight men in Europe have tried and died until finally 
 success was insured. 
 
 Daedalus' adventure finds an echo in the Germanic saga of Way- 
 land the Smith (Anglo-Saxon Weland, Old Scandinavian Volundr), 
 the artificer of marvelous weapons extolled in Icelandic, English, 
 French, and German poetry. King Nidung endeavored to keep him 
 in his service by cutting the sinews of his feet and thus laming him 
 forever. Wayland forged a feather robe and, flying up to the highest 
 tower of the royal castle, revealed his purpose to the king, and flew 
 off to his home on Seeland. Wayland is represented on an Anglo- 
 Saxon box of walrus bone of the eighth century, covered with Runic 
 inscriptions; in this carving, his brother, Egil, is engaged in capturing 
 birds from whose skins the clever smith will prepare his feather- 
 shirt. 
 
 To mention all the winged gods of Greece and their flights through 
 space would mean to pass in review a substantial portion of Greek 
 mythology which is a subject of common knowledge. Suffice it to 
 
64 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 refer to Hermes or Mercury, the messenger and herald of the gods, 
 of supernatural swiftness, often represented with winged shoes and 
 cap; and to Perseus, who received from the nymphs a pair of winged 
 sandals, a pouch, and the cap of Hades which rendered the wearer 
 invisible. 
 
 On the Greek stage theatrical machines (meckane, geranos) were 
 used to convey the illusion of persons descending from the air or being 
 lifted upward ; for instance, in Aeschylus' Fettered Prometheus, where 
 the choir descends on a winged chariot and where the god Okeanos 
 arrives on a fantastic conveyance. 
 
 Archytas was a Greek who lived at Tarentum in southern Italy 
 (about 428-347 B.C.). He was a philosopher of the Pythagorean 
 school, mathematician, statesman, and general. Numerous fragments 
 and titles of works are ascribed to him, but the authenticity of some 
 is doubted. He attained great skill as a practical mechanician, and 
 his flying dove of wood was one of the wonders of antiquity. He lost 
 his life drowning on a voyage in the Adriatic. What his flying dove 
 was is not clear from the few succinct and unsatisfactory accounts we 
 have. It is described as having consisted of a wooden figure balanced 
 by a weight that was suspended from a pulley; it is said to have 
 soared in the air and to have been set in motion by a current of air 
 "hidden and enclosed" in its interior, or by compressed air escaping 
 from a valve. Some scholars incline to the opinion that it was an 
 anticipation of the hot-air balloon; others think that it was an aero- 
 stat or glider, as it is said it could fly, but not rise again after falling. 
 It may also have been on the order of Lu Pan's wooden kite (p. 23), 
 but assuredly it was not a paper kite, as sometimes assumed. 
 
 Reference has been made to the Indian traditions of Greek air- 
 ships (p. 51), but thus far no confirmation of such flying-machines has 
 been found in Greek sources. 
 
 It will not be amiss to cast a glance at the writings of Lucian, that 
 delightful satirist and divine liar of the second century of our era, as 
 his imageries of air voyages have inspired such eminent authors as 
 Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Swift. In his "Icaromenippus or 
 the Journey above the Clouds" Lucian introduces the flyer Menippus 
 as a persiflage of Daedalus, who goes one better than his predecessor 
 by refraining from the use of wax. He took an eagle and a vulture of 
 the largest kind, clipped their wings off together -vith the shoulders, 
 and fastened to himself the eagle's right wing and the vulture's left 
 wing by means of strong leather straps, to the ends of which two 
 handles were attached as a grip for his hands. Thus he essayed to 
 
From Babylon and Persia to the Greeks and the Arabs 65 
 
 fly, first timidly, leaping with a movement of his hands and, as geese 
 do, keeping close to the ground on tiptoe and flapping his wings. 
 Seeing that he succeeded, he attempted a bolder stunt, ascended the 
 citadel, plunged downward, and flew to the theatre without a mishap. 
 After several minor trials and exercises he scaled the Olympus, and 
 carrying a supply of victuals as light as possible, started his flight 
 skyward, crossed the clouds, and reached the moon. 
 
 In another work known as The True History, Lucian relates how, 
 prompted by curiosity, he sailed from the pillars of Hercules and 
 launched into the western ocean. A whirlwind carried him with his 
 mariners toward a resplendent island which turned out to be the 
 moon. There they were met by a curious class of creatures who styled 
 themselves Hippogypes ("Horse-vultures"), — men riding on huge 
 vultures which they rode like horses. These vultures were of enor- 
 mous size, almost all of them provided with three heads; each of their 
 feathers was longer and thicker than the mast of a large transport- 
 vessel. The Hippogypes had the duty of encircling the island and 
 conducting any stranger they encountered to the court of the king. 
 This was Endymion, king of the moon, who at that time was engaged 
 in a war with Phaeton, king of the sun. Lucian and his crew were 
 graciously received by his lunar majesty, who requested their cooper- 
 ation in the ensuing campaign, and as an inducement offered to 
 furnish each with one of his royal vultures and the equipment per- 
 taining to it. 
 
 The importance of Lucian's work rests on the fact that it gave the 
 impetus in France to a class of fiction known as "voyages imaginaires" 
 in which are recounted imaginary excursions to the planets or moon, 
 like Cyrano de Bergerac's adventurous journey to the lunar world. 
 Following Godwin's example (p. 61), Cyrano deBergerac (1620-55) 
 wrote the "Histoire comique de la lune et du soleil," relating aerial 
 journeys to the lunar and solar worlds, wherein flight is achieved by 
 such chimerical contrivances as the ascensive power of the dew when 
 contained in glass balls and subjected to the sun's rays (an idea pro- 
 bably borrowed from Francesco Lana, see p. 21), or the use of a "very 
 light machine of iron" drawn upward through the atmosphere by the 
 attractive power of the loadstone. 
 
 The Arabs, the heirs of Greek philosophy and science, were clever 
 mechanicians, and independently made considerable progress in 
 mechanical devices. They were, as Washington Irving characterizes 
 
66 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 them, a quick-witted, sagacious, proud-spirited, and poetical people, 
 and were imbued with Oriental science and literature. Wherever they 
 established a seat of power, it became the rallying-place for the 
 learned and ingenious. 
 
 About the year 875 of our era an Arabic mechanician of Spain, 
 Abu'l Qasim Abbas Ibn Firnas, called the Sage of Spain, devised a 
 contrivance to make his body rise into the air; he made a pair of 
 wings, clothed himself with feathers, and flew quite a distance 
 through the air, but, as he had not taken into consideration what 
 would happen during his descent, he fell and injured his buttocks. 
 He was ignorant of the fact, the Arabic chronicler adds, that a bird 
 falls only on his rump, and had forgotten to make a tail for himself. 
 This man was the first who manufactured glass in Spain and who 
 constructed clepsydras. In his house he made a model of the heavens 
 in which he showed the stars, clouds, lightning and thunder. It is 
 therefore credible that a man of his mechanical ability was led to 
 make attempts at flying. 
 
 The story of a flying architect is handed down by Ibn al-Faqih, an 
 Arabic geographer, who lived in the tenth century. He erected in 
 Hamadan, Persia, a huge tower for King Shapur I, son of the founder 
 of the Sasanian dynasty of Persia. The jealous king decided to leave 
 the master-builder on the top of the tower, as he did not want any 
 one else to profit by his genius. The architect consented, but asked 
 one favor of the king; he was permitted to erect a wooden hut on the 
 tower to protect his corpse from the attack of vultures. The king 
 granted the request and ordered to supply him with as much timber 
 as he needed. Then the architect was abandoned to his fate. He 
 took up his tools, made a pair of wings from the wood left with him, 
 and fastened them to his body. Driven by the wind he rose into the 
 air and landed unscathed at a safe place, where he kept in hiding. 
 This tradition exhibits a striking affinity with the Daedalus story. 
 The same Arabic author, in describing the scenes represented in the 
 chamber of Perwiz near Behistun, mentions the figure of Fattus, a 
 celebrated Arabic architect, outfitted with the wings of a bird, — 
 presumably an emblem of architecture and sculpture. 
 
 Under the emperor Manuel Comnenus a Saracen tried to show 
 his skill in flying before a large audience at Constantinople. An eye- 
 witness relates the story as follows: "It was on the occasion of the 
 festivities held in honor of a Sultan of the Seljuks, who had come on 
 a visit. The Saracen clambered a tower of the hippodrome where the 
 horse-races were held, and announced that he would fly across the 
 
From Babylon and Persia to the Greeks and the Arabs 67 
 
 race-course. There he stood on the tower, clad in a very long and 
 wide garment of white color braced with rods of willow-wood laid 
 over a frame- work. The cloth was loosely draped over this frame, 
 and he intended to fly like a ship with its sail, hoping that the wind 
 would catch in the folds of his garment. All eyes were intently fixed 
 upon him, and the onlookers, enjoying the spectacle, kept on shout- 
 ing, 'Fly, fly!' and 'How long will you put us off, Saracen, and esti- 
 mate the wind from the tower?' The emperor sent a messenger over 
 to detain him from the adventure. The Sultan, who was among the 
 spectators, was filled with fear and hope, and worried about his com- 
 patriot. He, however, remained undisturbed, frequently examined 
 the wind, and put the audience off. He often raised his arms, used 
 them like wings, and lowered them to catch the wind. When the 
 wind appeared to him favorable, he soared like a bird and seemed to 
 fly in the air." 
 
 Oliver (also Eilmer or Elmer) of Malmesbury, an English astro- 
 loger and mechanician, who lived early in the eleventh century, is 
 said to have fitted wings to his hands and feet and to have attempted 
 to fly off from a tower with the help of the wind. He fell and broke 
 his legs, and attributed his failure to the lack of a tail. Milton, in his 
 "History of Britain" (1670), thus relates the story of the attempted 
 flight: "He in his youth strangely aspiring, had made and fitted wings 
 to his hands and feet; with these on the top of a tower, spread out to 
 gather air, he flew more than a furlong; but the wind being too high, 
 came fluttering down, to the maiming of all his limbs; yet so conceited 
 of his art, that he attributed the cause of his fall to the want of a tail, 
 as birds have, which he forgot to make to his hinder parts." Hodgson 
 regards this story as legendary. Be this as it may, it bears such a strik- 
 ing resemblance to the Arabic accounts of flying aforementioned that 
 a connection between the two must inevitably be assumed: either 
 Oliver made his attempt in imitation of the Arab of whose experiment 
 he had heard or read, or the story itself is patterned after the Arabic 
 model. 
 
 Giovanni Battista Danti, a mathematician of Perugia, is said to 
 have attempted about 1490 winged flights over the lake of Trasimeno 
 in Umbria. 
 
 A similar adventure is ascribed to John Damian, abbot of Tung- 
 land, an Italian by birth, who came to Edinburgh from France in 
 1501 and became the favorite of King James IV, residing at the 
 Scottish court in the capacity of physician to the king's household. 
 In the autumn of 1507 when an embassy had been sent to France, 
 
68 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 Damian averred he could overtake it by flying and to arrive in France 
 before the ambassadors. He made from bird-feathers a pair of wings 
 which he fastened on to himself, and hopped off from the top of 
 Stirling Castle, but shortly fell to the ground and broke his legs. This 
 failure he attributed to the fact that some hen feathers were contained 
 in his wings and showed a natural affinity to return to the barnyard 
 instead of maintaining flight skyward. John Lesley, bishop of Ross, 
 who records this story in his "History of Scotland" (1578), winds up 
 with the remark that in this adventure Damian was endeavoring to 
 outdo King Bladud (p. 14). At any rate Damian was not so wrong 
 from the standpoint of his time in laying the blame for his misfortune 
 on the chicken feathers. During the middle ages it was a wide-spread 
 superstition that one could not sleep well on a feather pillow, nor 
 could one easily die on it. Bird-feathers were believed to retain the 
 soul, hence the pillow had to be pulled away from under a moribund. 
 In Ireland the belief prevailed that when a dying man suffered great 
 agony, it was due to the presence of chicken-feathers in his bed, and 
 his friends would sometimes lift him up and place him upon the floor 
 to relieve him. In Norway it was a rule not to have chicken-feathers 
 in one's pillow, for the chickens have a certain feather known as 
 "restless feather" on which no one can sleep or die. 
 
 Roger Bacon (1214-94), the Franciscan monk, one of the few 
 great scholars of the middle ages, merits a place in the prehistory (I 
 say advisedly prehistory, not history) of aviation, as he points to the 
 possibility of a flying-machine. In his "Epistola de secretis operibus," 
 written about 1250, he affirms in the chapter "Of Admirable Artificial 
 Instruments," "Likewise flying-machines con be made in such a way 
 that a man is seated in the midst of the machine, revolving some sort 
 of device by means of which wings artificially composed may beat 
 the air after the fashion of a flying bird." The Latin original is as 
 follows: "Item possunt fieri instrumenta volandi, ut homo sedeat in 
 medio instrumenti revolvens aliquod ingenium, per quod alae artifi- 
 cialiter compositae aerem verberent ad modum avis volantis." Dis- 
 cussing other mechanical devices, Bacon continues that "all these 
 were made in ancient times and have also been made in our times, as 
 it is certain, with the sole exception of the flying-machine which I 
 have not seen, nor do I know any one who has seen it, but I know an 
 expert who has thought out the way to make one" (Haec autem facta 
 sunt antiquitus, et nostris temporibus facta sunt, ut certum est, nisi sit 
 instrumentum volandi, quod non vidi, nee hominem qui vidisset cog- 
 novi; sed sapientem, qui hoc artificium excogitavit explere, cognosco). 
 
From Babylon and Persia to the Greeks and the Arabs 69 
 
 Roger Bacon has been greatly overestimated in modern times, 
 until Professor Lynn Thorndike in his "History of Magic and Experi- 
 mental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era" 
 (1923) has successfully refuted the exaggerated and distorted estimate 
 of his importance and uniqueness and has presented the man and his 
 work in a critical and just attitude. In fact Bacon was as supersti- 
 tious and credulous as the majority of his contemporaries. In the 
 chapter just cited he speaks, for instance, "of machines that can be 
 made for walking in the seas and rivers, even to the bottom without 
 danger; for Alexander the Great employed such that he might see the 
 secrets of the deep." The story of Alexander diving into the sea in a 
 sort of submarine is, of course, not historical, but appears only among 
 the fictions of the Alexander Romance, which Bacon evidently swal- 
 lowed as historical truth. What his real notions of flying were appears 
 from the following passage inserted in the midst of his discussion of 
 experimental science (characterized by Thorndike as "an instance of 
 his gullibility") : "It is certain that Ethiopian sages have come into 
 Italy, Spain, France, England, and those Christian lands where there 
 are good flying dragons; and by an occult art that they possess, excite 
 the dragons, and drive them at top speed through the air, in order to 
 soften the rigidity and toughness of their flesh, just as boars, bears, 
 and bulls are hunted with dogs and beaten with many blows before 
 they are killed for eating. And when they have tamed the dragons 
 in this way, they have an art of preparing their flesh. . .which they 
 employ against the accidents of age and prolong life and inspire the 
 intellect beyond all estimation. For no education which man can give 
 will bestow such wisdom as does the eating of their flesh, as we have 
 learned without deceit or doubt from men of proven trustworthiness." 
 This much the Chinese knew centuries before our era. The preceding 
 quotation shows that Bacon's mind was steeped in Oriental lore, and 
 there is no doubt that his notions of flying are traceable to this 
 source. In particular, the legend of men who tame flying dragons by 
 their incantations and magic appears among the thirteenth century 
 additions to the famous letter of Prester John in which the marvels of 
 India and adjacent territories are recorded, and this must be the 
 source of Bacon's version. 
 
 We know that Bacon to some extent was under the influence of 
 Arabic science. His mathematical ideas are based on Latin transla- 
 tions of Arabic works, particularly through the medium of Witelo, a 
 Polish scholar, his contemporary, who studied the writings of Alhazen 
 (Ibn al-Haitham, 965-1038) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037). 
 
70 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 It is therefore an exaggeration to say with Hodgson that "the 
 first dawn of a rational idea of flight and of a belief in the possibility 
 of achieving it is revealed in the writings of Roger Bacon," or with 
 Brown that "with prophetic vision he saw the wonders that the future 
 might hold." After quoting the above passage with reference to a 
 flying-machine, Brown continues, "This single observation can hardly 
 justify us in regarding Roger Bacon as a student of aeronautics, and 
 the thought behind it was alien to the thought of the time. Neverthe- 
 less, it was a portent that the mental attitude of the middle ages 
 would not last for ever." On the contrary, the thought was not at all 
 novel or alien to his time, but was merely the echo of an ancient idea 
 that we have traced in China and India as well as among the Persians 
 and Arabs. Bacon is very far from being the herald of a new era and 
 opening the historical period of air navigation; his place is at the end 
 of the line of its prehistoric age. 
 
 The modern history of aviation begins with Leonardo da Vinci 
 (1452-1519), who was a true pioneer of science by studying the flight 
 of birds and left several sketches of aeroplanes in his manuscripts 
 which were hidden in obscurity for nearly three hundred years until 
 their existence was revealed in 1797. This subject, however, as well 
 as the modern development of aircraft is beyond the scope of this 
 inquiry. 
 
THE AIR MAIL OF ANCIENT TIMES 
 
 To one who look'd from upper air 
 
 O'er all the enchanted regions there, 
 
 How beauteous must have been the glow, 
 
 The life, the sparkling from below! 
 
 Fair gardens, shining streams, with ranks 
 
 Of golden melons on their banks, 
 
 More golden where the sun-light falls; — 
 
 Gay lizards, glittering on the walls 
 
 Of ruin'd shrines, busy and bright 
 
 As they were all alive with light; — 
 
 And, yet more splendid, numerous flocks 
 
 Of pigeons, settling on the rocks, 
 
 With their rich restless wings, that gleam 
 
 Variously in the crimson beam 
 
 Of the warm west — as if inlaid 
 
 With brilliants from the mine, or made 
 
 Of tearless rainbows, such as span 
 
 The unclouded skies of Peristan! 
 
 Thomas Moore, Paradise and The Peri 
 
 Air-mail service was first established in the United States in the 
 year 1918 when the New York- Washington mail route (218 miles) 
 was inaugurated on May 15. A year later the Cleveland-Chicago 
 route (325 miles) was opened. The New York-Cleveland service 
 (430 miles) followed on July 1, 1919. On August 16, 1920, the Chi- 
 cago-St. Louis service (300 miles) was inaugurated, and on September 
 8 of the same year New York was connected by air mail with San 
 Francisco (2,651 miles). 
 
 While our air mail is one of the epoch-making innovations and 
 achievements of modern times, there was also a "prehistoric" air mail 
 which is no less admirable — carried on the wings of pigeons. This 
 prodigious institution we also owe to the Orient. I propose to survey 
 it from China and India to Persia and the Near East and to show 
 how it was transmitted from there to Europe. 
 
 The first Chinese who has gone down in history as having made 
 use of carrier pigeons is Chang Kiu-ling (A.D. 673-740), who flour- 
 ished as a statesman and poet under the emperor Ming Huang of the 
 T'ang dynasty. In his youth he was in the habit of corresponding 
 with his relatives by means of a flock of carrier pigeons which he 
 trained in large numbers and which he called his "flying slaves." Fei 
 nu ("flying slaves") is still a designation of a carrier pigeon. The 
 messages were attached to the feet of the birds, and they were taught 
 how to deliver them. 
 
 It is singular that the government organs of China never saw this 
 opportunity and never availed themselves of pigeons for conveying 
 
 71 
 
72 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 important messages, as it was done by the kings of India and by the 
 Mohammedan rulers in the Near East. The employment of carrier 
 pigeons remained restricted to private correspondence, chiefly for 
 commercial purposes. They were of great service to merchants in 
 conveying intelligence to the producing districts, or bringing news 
 of the arrivals of cargoes and the ruling prices of the markets. In the 
 old days of the Manchu empire merchants of Hongkong used pigeons 
 in sending news to their business partners at Canton of the arrival 
 of the English, French, or American mails. In Canton they are 
 termed ch'un shii kop ("letter-transmitting pigeons"). 
 
 Up to the time of the introduction of telephones in Peking, carrier 
 pigeons (called sung sin, "letter-carriers") were used to send quota- 
 tions of money exchange rates from the banks located in the Chinese 
 City to those in the Manchu City. 
 
 The Chinese say that carrier pigeons are difficult to train and that 
 it takes two or three years before they can be employed for long 
 distance flights, which quite agrees with our own experiences. It 
 takes about three years to determine the qualifications of a good 
 homing pigeon for a five-hundred-mile flight. 
 
 While the Chinese have never bred carrier pigeons on a large scale 
 or intensively, they have added to the art of pigeon-training an at- 
 tractive means of amusement: in the same manner as they were the 
 first who communed with the air by means of kites, they also were the 
 first who created "music on the air." This was accomplished by 
 means of whistles extremely light in weight, attached to the pigeon's 
 tail-feathers. These whistles consist of two, three, or five reed tubes 
 of graded length in the shape of a Pandean pipe, varnished yellow, 
 brown, or black; or of a small gourd into which reed pipes are in- 
 serted. A collection of these whistles, some engraved with the names 
 of the makers, is on view in a case illustrating the musical instruments 
 of China in the West Gallery of the Museum; there also a mounted 
 pigeon outfitted with the whistle and photographs of live pigeons 
 thus equipped and taken in Peking may be seen. When a flock of 
 pigeons circles the air, the wind strikes the apertures of the instru- 
 ments which are set vibrating, and produce a not unpleasing, open-air 
 concert whose charms are heightened by the fact that the whistles 
 used in a flock are tuned differently. The Chinese explain that the 
 sounds of the whistles are intended to keep the flocks together and to 
 protect the birds from onslaughts of hawks and other birds of prey. 
 This rationalistic interpretation, however, is not convincing. It is 
 not known and at least doubtful whether such music makes an im- 
 
The Air Mail of Ancient Times 73 
 
 pression on either pigeon or hawk, and would it really prevent the 
 famished princes and pirates of the air from making a swoop at their 
 quarry? Even supposed this might happen once in a while, we must 
 consider that this music constantly fills the atmosphere year by year, 
 and the unrelenting foes of the pigeon will gradually become accus- 
 tomed to it and treat it with disdain or disregard. It seems more 
 plausible that this quaint custom has no rational origin, but that it 
 rather is the outcome of purely emotional and artistic tendencies. 
 Psychologically, the pigeon whistles move along the same line as the 
 musical bows attached to kites. It is not the pigeon that profits from 
 the aerial music, but the human ear that feasts on the wind-blown 
 tunes and derives esthetic enjoyment from them. 
 
 The pigeons which fly about with whistles attached to them are 
 termed "mid-sky beauties" (pan t'ien kiao jen). 
 
 In India the use of carrier pigeons goes back to a great antiquity, 
 and may with certainty be assumed as having been in full swing in 
 the beginning of our era. The Arthacastra, an ancient handbook of 
 polity and state wisdom written in Sanskrit by Kautilya, a minister 
 of state, gives us the specific information that the kings of India re- 
 ceived news about the movements of hostile troops by air mail, 
 through domesticated pigeons which brought them stamped and 
 sealed letters. 
 
 In Indian stories various kinds of birds appear as harbingers of 
 messages. A white wild goose, for instance, who had been with a 
 prince all his life carries to him a letter from his parents into a remote 
 kingdom, and returns there with a response from him (in the legend 
 of Kalyanamkara and Papamkara). Aryadeva received an invitation 
 to come to Nalanda by a letter attached to the neck of a crow (in 
 Taranatha's History of Buddhism in India). Parrots frequently 
 appear in the role of winged messengers. 
 
 Linschoten, who travelled in India in the seventeenth century, 
 mentions the fact that he met in India a Venitian who had brought 
 carrier pigeons along to try them out and naturalize them. John 
 Fryer, who travelled in the East from 1672 to 1681, notes in his 
 description of Surat carrier pigeons with blubbered noses and of a 
 brown color to carry letters. The fact that Darwin received carriers 
 from Madras would seem to point to their use in southern India. 
 
 As regards Persia, an interesting bit of evidence is preserved by 
 Twan Ch'eng-shi, author of the Yu yang tsa tsu (ninth century), to 
 the effect that on the sea-going vessels of the Persians many pigeons 
 were kept, capable of flying several thousand li (Chinese miles) ; these 
 
74 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 were released and at a single flight returned to their homes, bearing 
 as it were the tidings that everything on board was well. 
 
 Ch'ang Te, a Chinese traveller, was sent m 1259 by the Mongol 
 emperor, Mangu, as envoy to his brother Hulagu, king of Persia. 
 He kept a diary of his journey which was edited in 1263 by Liu Yu. 
 Speaking of the postal service of Persia in his time he mentions a 
 special kind of swift camel trained for the service of couriers, as well 
 as pigeons which transmit news to a distance of a thousand li (Chin- 
 ese miles) in one day. In mediaeval times Persian authors repeatedly 
 refer to the conveyance of letters by pigeon-mail in western Asia, 
 even in time of war. In 1262 when the Mongols besieged the city of 
 Mosul, they caught a tired pigeon which was perching for rest on one 
 of their catapults and which carried a message for the beleaguered. 
 The letter was intercepted, and was found to contain news of the 
 approach of an army for the relief of the city. This enabled the 
 Mongols in time to throw an army against the onmarching enemy. 
 
 The pigeon appears in love-songs of the Baluchi, an Iranian tribe 
 inhabiting Afganistan. One of these love-messages begins, "Oh dove! 
 Oh pigeon, among the birds be thou a messenger of my state to my 
 love. Travel over the long distance, I beg of thee, blue bird, fly from 
 the cliff where thou dwellest night, from the rugged rocks of the fowls 
 of the air, go to my beloved's home and perch on the right side of her 
 bed." In another love-song it is said, "Oh pigeon, peahen among the 
 birds, be a messenger of my state to my true-love, to that modest 
 fair one." (M. L. Dames, Popular Poetry of the Baloches.) 
 
 Pigeons were used by the ancients for sending love messages (Ana- 
 creon IX, 15; Martialis VIII, 32), news of a victory in the Olympic 
 games, or letters into a besieged city. The earliest Greek allusion to a 
 carrier pigeon is found in one of the fragments of Pherecrates, a 
 writer of comedies, who lived in the fifth century before our era. 
 Greek seafarers are said to have carried on their ships pigeons for the 
 purpose of sending home tidings of their welfare. 
 
 Aelianus, who lived in the second century of our era, tells this 
 story, "When Taurosthenes won the laurels in the Olympic games, 
 intelligence of his victory was conveyed to his father at Aeginaon the 
 same day by means of a pigeon whom he took away from her young 
 ones who were still unfeathered. He attached a purple piece of cloth 
 to the bird and released her; she sped away to her young ones and in 
 a day returned from Pisa to Aegina." 
 
 Pisa was an ancient town in the territory of Elis in the western 
 part of the Peloponnesus, not far from Olympia, where the celebrated 
 
The Air Mail of Ancient Times 75 
 
 athletic games and contests were held. The distance from Pisa to 
 Aegina amounts to about twenty-three and a half geographical miles. 
 It will be noticed that in this case not a letter, but merely a pre-ar- 
 ranged token of victory was attached to the flying messenger; purple 
 was a symbol of victory. 
 
 Pliny (X, 110) relates that pigeons have acted as messengers in 
 important affairs (internuntiae in magnis rebus fuere) and cites as 
 example that during the siege of Mutina, Decimus Brutus, who was 
 beleaguered in that city by Antonius from December, 44, till April, 
 43 B.C., sent into the camp of the consuls (Hirtius and Pansa) dis- 
 patches fastened to pigeon's feet (epistulas adnexas earum pedibus). 
 A somewhat different version of this event is contained in the work of 
 Frontinus (Strategemata III. 13, 8) of the first century of our era: 
 the Consul Hirtius attached letters to the neck of pigeons by means of 
 strong hair; previously he had starved the pigeons in a dark room; 
 thereupon he released them near Mutina, where they settled on the 
 roofs of the houses, and were caught by Brutus, who in this manner 
 was duly informed of the events. Caesar is said to have been advised 
 of a revolt in Gaul by pigeon-post just in time that he could lead his 
 legion down the Alps to suppress the rebellion. 
 
 However, what is known about the use of carrier pigeons among 
 Greeks and Romans is restricted to isolated instances. We must not 
 generalize that it was a customary practice, for there are no records 
 of carrier pigeons having been kept and trained for such purpose in 
 large numbers, nor was there anything like a regular pigeon-mail. 
 The curious fact remains that carrier pigeons were not transmitted 
 from Italy to northern Europe in the wake of Roman civilization. 
 The North-European nations first made the acquaintance of carrier 
 pigeons in the Orient during the Crusades, and from that time onward 
 they appeared inEurope, inclusive of Italy, as a novel affair. There- 
 fore it is reasonable to conclude that among the ancients the whole 
 business was of no great significance and that it was extinct in the 
 days of the declining Roman Empire. The consensus of opinion is 
 that the Greeks derived the institution from the Near East, and we 
 have to wend our way back again to the Orient to learn more about 
 its history. 
 
 Mesopotamia appears to be the home of the domesticated pigeon, 
 and the domestication of the bird was accomplished as early as pre- 
 Semitic times by the Sumerians. In Sumerian documents the pigeon 
 is referred to as a domestic bird. Among the Semites pigeons were 
 
76 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 closely connected with religious practices? They are sacred to the 
 goddess Ishtar (Astarte), the mother goddess or great goddess per- 
 sonifying the productive powers of the earth, life, generation, and 
 death. 
 
 Lucian, in his treatise on The Syrian Goddess, informs us with 
 reference to Syria, "Of birds the dove seems to be the most holy to 
 them, nor do they think it right to harm these birds, and if any one 
 have harmed them unknowingly, they are unholy for that day; so 
 when the pigeons dwell with the men, they enter their rooms and 
 commonly feed on the ground." 
 
 It is unknown, however, when and where pigeons were first 
 trained for conveying messages. Nothing to this effect has as yet come 
 to light in the cuneiform literatures or on Egyptian monuments; 
 both in Egypt and Mesopotamia the practice was unknown. At the 
 outset it is improbable that it might have been developed in the Eu- 
 phrates valley, where clay tablets were the common writing-material, 
 which on account of their weight could not have been attached to 
 pigeons; in later times, of course, parchment and papyrus were also 
 used in Mesopotamia. 
 
 The dove which Noah sent forth from the ark three times has 
 frequently been classified among carrier pigeons, but this notion is 
 erroneous. Noah's dove represents an entirely distinct class: it is not 
 sent out with a message, but belongs to the category of land-spying 
 birds, such as navigators of ancient times used to keep on board their 
 ships and which were released by them when in quest of land if they 
 had lost their bearings, on the supposition that the birds would fly in 
 the direction of land; these birds, of course, never returned to their 
 ships. In the Pali Baveru Jataka, which echoes ancient commercial 
 relations of India with Baveru or Babiru, i.e. Babylon, the Indian 
 seafarers are assisted by a crow which serves for the purpose of direct- 
 ing their way in the four quarters. The crow has a well-developed 
 sense of locality, and in all ancient systems of divinations crow or 
 raven auguries are correlated with the cardinal points. According to 
 Pliny, the mariners of Taprobane (Ceylon) did not take recourse to 
 the observation of stars for the purpose of navigation, but carried 
 birds out to sea, which they sent off from time to time, and then 
 followed the course of the birds who flew in the direction of land. 
 When the people of Thera emigrated to Libya, ravens accompanied 
 them ahead of the ships to guide their way. In the ninth century 
 when the Vikings sailed from Norway, they kept on board birds who 
 were set free from time to time amid sea, and with their aid they 
 
The Air Mail of Ancient Times 77 
 
 succeeded in discovering Iceland. Land expeditions also were ac- 
 companied by land-spying birds, and tribes on the path of migration 
 would settle in a territory where birds carried along by them would 
 descend. The Celts, as Justinus informs us, were skilled beyond 
 other peoples in the science of augury, and the Gauls who invaded 
 Illyricum were guided by the flight of birds. The legendary emperor 
 Jimmu of ancient Japan when engaged in a war expedition marched 
 under the guidance of a gold-colored raven. 
 
 It is asserted by many authors that the ancient Hebrews were 
 acquainted with carrier pigeons, but there is no direct evidence to 
 this effect in the Old or New Testament. 
 
 In the present state of our knowledge we can only assert with 
 safety that the highest development in the use of pigeon messengers 
 was reached in the empire of the Caliphs and under the Moham- 
 medan dynasties of Egypt when the whole business was organized 
 and systematized on a scientific basis, while, of course, isolated cases 
 occurred many centuries earlier. The Arabs, on their part, were only 
 to a small extent original or inventive, but exceedingly clever in ab- 
 sorbing and digesting the ideas and cultures of subject nations, and 
 thus created an imperialistic civilization as a result of their far-flung 
 conquests. Indo-Iranian peoples may very well have given the first 
 impetus to the training of carrier pigeons. 
 
 Damiri (1341-1405), in his Book of Animals ( Hay at al-hayawan), 
 writes in regard to the pigeon, "It may be mentioned as a part of its 
 nature that it seeks and finds out its nest even if it be set free at a 
 distance of a thousand leagues; it carries news and brings it from a 
 very distant place in a very short time. There are some pigeons 
 which can fly three thousand leagues in a day. It may sometimes 
 happen that it is caught, and may be thus away from its native place 
 for ten years or more, but it still retains its intelligence and power of 
 memory, and is desirous of returning to its native place, so that when 
 it finds an opportunity, it flies back to it." 
 
 Damiri likewise informs us that the Caliph Harun al-Rashid 
 (786-809) was very fond of pigeons and sporting with them. The 
 Arabian Nights (No. 698) introduce to us the father of Dalila who 
 was postmaster and guard of the carrier pigeons at the court of this 
 illustrious Caliph at a monthly salary of a thousand dinars; he used 
 to train the pigeons so that they conveyed letters and messages, and 
 to the Caliph each of these birds was dearer at a time of distress than 
 any of his sons. After her husband's death, Dalila and her daughter 
 took care of the forty pigeons, and she would daily visit the state 
 
78 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 council to find out whether the Caliph had a message to transmit by 
 pigeon-mail. 
 
 In another story of the Arabian Nights (No. 96), Afridun, king of 
 Constantinople, is advised of the movements of the Mohammedan 
 army in Asia Minor by means of a letter sent "on the wings of a bird" 
 and brought to him by the Guardian of the Pigeons. 
 
 According to Masudi (tenth century), news of the victory over a 
 rebel army was conveyed to the Caliph Motasim (838-847) by pigeon- 
 post. In 1171 the Sultan Nur-ed-din established a regular air mail in 
 Syria, actuated by the desire to obtain as quickly as possible intelli- 
 gence of everything that happened in all of his provinces. For this 
 purpose he ordered pigeons to be maintained in all castles and fort- 
 resses of his empire, also had special towers erected for breeding and 
 postal purposes, and devoted the greatest care to the training of the 
 birds. After his death this mail service declined until in the year 1179 
 it was re-established by the Caliph Ahmed Naser-lidin-allah, who had 
 a veritable passion for pigeons and bestowed a special name on each 
 bird. In sending a letter by pigeon-mail he was in the habit of desig- 
 nating in the letter the exact name of the feathered messenger, thus: 
 "This bird, son of ..." or "this bird, mother of. ... " In this manner 
 he conducted a voluminous correspondence with the remotest parts 
 of his dominion. The air mail developed into a general institution 
 in his time, and although many engaged in the business of raising 
 pigeons whose number was enormous, their prices reached amazing 
 figures: a well-trained pair sold at a price up to a thousand gold 
 pieces. Baghdad was the central station of the air mail until it was 
 conquered by the Mongols in 1258. 
 
 The price of a pigeon of the first quality amounted to seven 
 hundred dinars (gold coins), and the egg of such a bird sold as high 
 as twenty dinars. Genealogies of renowned pigeons were kept on 
 special registers. 
 
 One of the most curious incidents in the history of the pigeon- 
 mail, as reported by Makrizi, refers to the rapid transmission by air 
 of a consignment of cherries. The Caliph Aziz (975-996) of the Fati- 
 mid dynasty, distinguished by his tolerance and his love for science, 
 had a great desire for a dish of cherries of Balbek. The Vezir, Yakub 
 Ben-Kilis, caused six hundred pigeons to be dispatched from Balbek 
 to Cairo, each of which carried attached to either leg a small silk bag 
 containing a cherry. This is the first example of parcel post by air 
 mail recorded in history. 
 
The Air Mail of Ancient Times 79 
 
 In his "History of Egypt in the Middle Ages" Stanley Lane-Poole 
 writes, "The most famous and energetic of all the Bahri Mamluks, 
 Beybars (1266-77), established a well-organized system of posts, con- 
 necting every part of his wide dominions with the capital. Relays 
 of horses were in readiness and answered reports from all parts of the 
 realm. Besides the ordinary mail, there was also a pigeon-post, 
 which was no less carefully managed. The pigeons were kept in cots 
 in the citadel and at the various stages, which were farther apart than 
 those of the horses; the bird was trained to stop at the first post-cot 
 where its letter would be attached to the wing of another pigeon for 
 the next stage. The royal pigeons had a distinguishing mark, and 
 when one of these arrived at the citadel with a dispatch, none was 
 permitted to detach the parchment save the Sultan himself; and so 
 stringent were the rules, that were he dining or sleeping or in the bath, 
 he would nevertheless at once be informed of the arrival, and would 
 immediately proceed to disencumber the bird of its message." Bey- 
 bars connected Damascus and Cairo by a postal service of four days, 
 and used to play polo in both cities within the same week. Pigeons 
 contributed to the complete defeat of the Mongols after the decisive 
 battle of Hims (Emesa in Syria) in 1281, when they were beaten back 
 by Kalaun, who harassed their retreat and sent orders by pigeons to 
 his governors at the Euphrates to bar the fords to the fleeing enemy. 
 
 The letters, which were written on a fine tissue paper with speci- 
 fications of place, day, and hour, were fastened beneath the wings, 
 at a later time to the tail-feather. 
 
 The caretakers brought the incoming birds directly to the Sultan 
 who alone had the right to take the letters off. The pigeons were there- 
 fore called by the Arabs "angels of the kings." An Arabic scholar 
 says, "The carrier pigeons are arrows which reach their goal despite 
 the resistance offered them by the clouds. There is no mistake in 
 styling them the prophets among the birds, because like the 
 prophets they are dispatched with scriptures." An Arabic poet has 
 this line: "In the marvellous speed of their flight they rush ahead 
 of the winds; swiftly like a moment they bear under their wings 
 in rapid flight tidings of what happens in places distant a month's 
 journey." 
 
 Another Arabic author writes, "The pigeons who forward mes- 
 sages are a wonder of divine almightiness worthy of being admired 
 and praised by us. In faithfully executing their commissions they 
 confirm the proverb which calls them birds of auspicious foreboding. 
 Indeed they often surpass the itinerant messengers: the clouds are 
 
80 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 their bridles, the air is the course they race through, the wings are 
 their equipment, the winds are their escorts. They fear on their 
 nights neither brigands of the desert nor the perils threatening from 
 accidents on the roads." 
 
 In 1323 Symon Semeon, an Irish Franciscan, and his companion, 
 Hugo Illuminator, were on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and 
 stopped at Alexandria. An entry in Symon's diary reads as follows: 
 "The admiral [of Alexandria], on learning of the affair [the arrival of 
 the two pilgrims], immediately dispatched a message to the Sultan at 
 Cairo by means of a carrier pigeon. These pigeons were trained in the 
 Sultan's Castle at Cairo and sent in cages to the governors of the 
 various maritime cities, who whenever they wish to make something 
 known to the Sultan dispatch one with a letter tied under its tail, 
 which never stops until it has reached the castle from which it was 
 brought originally; and so the Sultan and his governors are informed 
 daily of what is going on in the country and of the necessary measures 
 to be taken." 
 
 A German pilgrim, von Bodmann, paid a visit to the Holy Land in 
 1376-77, and when his ship neared Alexandria, she was boarded by 
 two officials from the city who drew up two lists of the vessel's cargo. 
 These, he relates, were tied to the wings of two pigeons who were 
 dispatched to the court of King Soldan at Babylon, a distance of two 
 hundred miles. 
 
 In the second half of the fifteenth century the governmental 
 pigeon-post expired in consequence of political troubles, but as a 
 means of private communication it has survived in the Orient long 
 after and even until the present time, especially in commercial 
 correspondence when transactions had to be made quickly or when 
 perishable merchandize like drugs and perfumes were at stake. 
 Travelling merchants also availed themselves of the air mail to advise 
 their families of their safe arrival at a place. 
 
 In 1599 Thomas Dallam, the organ-builder, during his voyage 
 from London to Constantinople, made the following observation on 
 the use of carrier pigeons: "The firste of June thare was letters con- 
 vayede varrie straingly from Alippo to Scandaroune, the which is 
 thre score and twelve myles distance. After I hade bene thare a 
 litle whyle, I persaved that it was an ordinarie thinge. For, as we 
 weare sittinge in our marchantes house talkinge, and pidgons weare a 
 feedinge in the house before us, thare came a whyte cote pidgon fly- 
 inge in, and lyghte on the grounde amongeste his fellowes, the which, 
 when one of the marchantes saw, he sayd: Welcom, Honoste Tom, 
 
The Air Mail of Ancient Times 81 
 
 and, takinge him upe, thare was tied with a thred under his wynge, a 
 letter, the bignes of a twelve penc, and it was Dated but four houres 
 before. After that I saw the lyke done, and always in 4 houres." 
 
 Linschoten, the great Dutch traveller of the seventeenth century, 
 describes the pigeon-mail in the Turkish empire extending from Bas- 
 sora and Babylonia to Aleppo and Constantinople, and writes that 
 the letters were fastened to a ring placed around the bird's leg. 
 
 Pietro della Valle (Viaggi in Turchia, Persia e India, Vol. I, 
 p. 284) wrote in a letter dispatched from Ispahan in 1619, "From the 
 Province of Babylon whither I addressed a letter I am awaiting some 
 pigeons which convey letters from one place to another and which 
 Tasso styles 'flying carrier' (portator volante). They have thus been 
 used in Asia from the earliest times down to the present." 
 
 The Jesuit father Philippe Avril (about 1670) relates how pigeon 
 messages were sent from Alexandria to Aleppo. "No sooner had we 
 got ashore," he writes, "but we had the pleasure to see dispatched 
 away before us one of the messengers which they make use of in those 
 parts to carry such intelligence as they would have speedily made 
 known. For the doing of which, their most usual way is this. A 
 merchant of Aleppo, who desires to have the most early information 
 of what merchandizes are come from France or any other parts, takes 
 particular care by an express to send away a pigeon that has young 
 ones, much about the time that the ships are expected at Alexan- 
 dretta, where he has his correspondent; who as soon as any vessel 
 comes to an anchor, goes and informs himself of what goods the 
 vessel has brought most proper for his turn; of which when he has 
 given a full account in his letter, he fastens the paper about the neck 
 of the winged courier, and carrying her to the top of a little mountain, 
 gives her her liberty, never fearing her going astray. The pigeon 
 which we saw let go, after she had soared a good height to discover, 
 doubtless, the place from whence she had been taken some few days 
 before, and pushed forward by that instinct, which is common to all 
 birds that have young ones, took her flight toward Aleppo, and ar- 
 rived there in less than three hours, tho that city be very near thirty 
 leagues from the place from whence she was sent. However, they do 
 not make use of any sort of pigeons to carry their dispatches, in regard 
 that all pigeons are not alike proper for that service. For there is a 
 particular sort of these birds, which are easily trained up to this ex- 
 ercise, and which as occasion serves, are of extraordinary use, espec- 
 ially for the swift management of business, and where speed of 
 intelligence is required, as in the factories of the Levant, far remote 
 
82 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 one from the other. This was the only piece of curiosity which 
 we could observe during our stay in this same first port of the 
 East." 
 
 During the middle ages, the European nations became acquainted 
 with the pigeon air mail when the cross and the crescent clashed dur- 
 ing the crusades. In the history of the enterprises against the infidels 
 there are several stories on record which depict the wonder and 
 amazement of the Christian soldiers at this novel experience. In 
 A.D. 1098 the commander of the Turkish castle Hasar disobeyed his 
 liege lord, Rodvan of Aleppo, who declared war on him. The Turkish 
 chief was unable to resist when one of his Emirs counselled him as 
 follows: "Recently when Christian pilgrims marched against Edessa, 
 I captured the wife of a knight, Fulcher (also called Foulqe) of 
 Bouillon, and married her on account of her beauty. She is acquainted 
 with our perilous situation and advises us to seek assistance from the 
 Duke of Lorraine, the most powerful of the victorious Franks." The 
 aversion toward an alliance with Christians was suppressed by the 
 apprehension of graver consequences, and a Syrian was dispatched 
 to the Duke with a ready proposal. Succor was promised by the 
 latter, and the son of the Turkish chief retained by him as hostage. 
 Meanwhile Rodvan beleaguered the fortress Hasar with an army of 
 forty thousand, and the Franks were at a loss as to how to send the 
 tidings of the pact into the fortress. To their amazement the Turkish 
 envoys brought pigeons forward and tied papers to the under side 
 of their wings. The birds were released, and the Franks assured that 
 the good news would reach the fortress and encourage the Emir in his 
 resistance till the arrival of the relief army. 
 
 Another episode is related thus: In A.D. 1099 when the Christian 
 army advanced from Akkon to Caesarea, a wounded pigeon, who had 
 a narrow escape from the claws of a hawk, dropped lifeless in the 
 camp of the Christians. The bishop of Apt picked the bird up and 
 found under its wings a letter addressed by the Emir of Ptolemais to 
 the Emir of Caesarea, reading as follows: "The cursed rabble of 
 Christians has just traversed my territory, and is passing on to yours. 
 All chiefs of Musulman towns should be informed of their onward 
 march and take measures to crush our foes." This letter was read 
 aloud in the council of princes and before the entire army. Surprise 
 and joy seized the Crusaders who did not doubt that God protected 
 their enterprise, since he sent them the birds of heaven to reveal the 
 secrets of the infidels. 
 
The Air Mail of Ancient Times 83 
 
 This incident has inspired Torquato Tasso (1544-95), the great 
 Italian poet of the Renaissance, to a poetic composition, which is 
 inserted in his La Gerusalemme Liberate, (Jerusalem Delivered, XVIII, 
 49-53). I give a literal prose rendering of my own: — 
 
 "While the camp prepares for assault and the city for defence, a 
 pigeon is seen towering high along aerial paths over the host of the 
 Franks. Agitating her swift pinions, she sails the clear air with out- 
 stretched wings, and the strange messenger (la messaggiera peregrina) 
 is just about to alight from the high clouds into the city. 
 
 "A falcon (I do not know whence) swoops downward, armed with 
 curved beak and large claws, and obstructs her path between the 
 camp and city-wall. She does not wait for the tyrant's claws, but he 
 pounces upon her and chases her to the main tent. He seems to 
 reach her now, and holds his foot over her tender head when she takes 
 refuge in the lap of the pious Godefroy of Bouillon. 
 
 "Godefroy takes her up and protects her, then, while looking at 
 her, notes a strange thing suspended from her neck and fastened with 
 a thread, — a letter concealed under a wing. He opens it and unfolds 
 it, well comprehending the terse message it contains. 'To the Lord of 
 Judea,' the epistle read, 'the Captain of Egypt sends greetings. 
 
 "Despond not, my lord, resist and hold out for four or five days, 
 and I will come to liberate these walls, and you will soon see your foe 
 vanquished.' This was the secret conveyed in pagan script and con- 
 fided to the winged courier, as the Levante employed such messengers 
 at that time. 
 
 "The prince released the pigeon who, since she had revealed her 
 master's secrets and fancied that she had betrayed him, did not dare 
 to return as an unlucky harbinger." 
 
 The poet had evidently read about carrier pigeons in the docu- 
 ments of the crusades, and was profoundly impressed by this ingen- 
 ious device of postal service. His detailed description, as well as his 
 observation that this was customary in the Levante, seem to hint 
 at the fact that letter-carrying pigeons were still unknown in the Italy 
 of his time, — the sixteenth century. 
 
 Lodovico Ariosto (1474-1533), in his Orlando Furioso (XV, 90), 
 also refers to the pigeon-post: The giant Orrilo was slain by the duke 
 Astolfo on the lower Nile, and this event was air-mailed by the 
 Castellan of Damiette to Cairo. This is the custom there, the Italian 
 poet adds, and in a few hours the news was broadcast to the whole of 
 Egypt that the bandit had met his death. 
 
84 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 Shakespeare alludes to pigeons as letter-carriers in Titus Andro- 
 nicus (IV, 3), where upon the entry of a clown with two pigeons 
 Titus exclaims, — 
 
 News, news from heaven! Marcus, the post is come. 
 Sirrah, what tidings? Have you any letters? 
 
 Another interesting reference, though not to carrier pigeons, oc- 
 curs in Venus and Adonis, where Venus rides in a chariot drawn by 
 doves: — 
 
 Thus weary of the world, away she hies, 
 
 And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aid 
 
 Their mistress, mounted, through the empty skies 
 
 In her light chariot quickly is convey'd; 
 
 Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen 
 
 Means to immure herself and not be seen. 
 
 The Crusaders brought carrier pigeons along from the Orient. 
 Mediaeval knights used them in sending communications from one 
 castle to another; the convents also availed themselves of pigeon 
 messengers. 
 
 A study of the various breeds of carrier pigeons has led Darwin 
 to the conviction that nearly all the chief domestic races existed 
 before the year 1600 and that the names for them applied in different 
 parts of Europe and in India to the several kinds of carriers all point 
 to Persia or the surrounding countries as the source of this race. 
 Certain it is that the common European breeds of pigeon were not 
 fit for air-mail purposes, but that all varieties used in Europe for 
 messenger service are of Oriental origin and in the last line are trace- 
 able to the bagdotte which under the name of carrier was bred to 
 perfection in England. The Baghdad pigeons won renown every- 
 where, and were known simply as a Baghdad, or Babylonian pigeon. 
 Thus Thomas Moore, in The Fire-Worshippers, has the line: — 
 
 As a young bird of Babylon, 
 Let loose to tell of victory won — 
 
 The great Rabelais (1483-1553), in his Gargantua and Pantag- 
 ruel (IV, 3), makes Pantagruel correspond with his father Gargantua 
 by means of a pigeon called "Gogal [the Hebrew word for a pigeon], 
 the heavenly messenger." Whenever the son was well or successful, 
 he tied a white ribbon to the bird's foot; in case something untoward 
 should happen to him, they had agreed on a black ribbon. Rabelais 
 describes in detail this manner of communication, the bird's desire 
 to return to her young ones as swiftly as possible and the rapidity 
 
The Air Mail of Ancient Times 85 
 
 of her flight, which seems to hint at the fact that this was a novel 
 feature in his time. 
 
 The first employment of pigeons for military purposes in Europe 
 took place during the war of liberation of the Netherlands in the 
 sixteenth century. During the siege of Harlem by the Spaniards in 
 1573, the garrison received several advices by pigeon-mail, an- 
 nouncing the approach of a relief army under the command of the 
 Prince of Orania, and therefore persevered in its resistance. In 
 commemoration of this event the Prince caused these pigeons to be 
 cared for until their end, and after their death they were stuffed and 
 preserved in the town-hall of Leiden. 
 
 The breeding of carrier pigeons was given special attention in 
 Belgium as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. From 
 Belgium the experience thus gained was transmitted to France and 
 Germany. In Belgium, Holland, and France the fondness of carrier 
 pigeons developed into a sport. 
 
 In the beginning of the nineteenth century the pigeon-mail took a 
 new development, chiefly for commercial purposes. The story goes 
 that Rothschild of London had his agents join Napoleon's army and 
 received from them first-hand war news by air mail. He was advised 
 of the emperor's defeat at Belle-Alliance three days earlier than the 
 British Government, and correspondingly arranged his financial specu- 
 lations. In the organization of the modern press and news agencies 
 pigeons also rendered useful services. Reuter, who subsequently 
 founded Reuter's Bureau in London, started his career by founding a 
 pigeon-post from Aix-la-Chapelle to Brussels, and the Gazette of 
 Cologne at first maintained such an aerial news service. In England 
 also, a newspaper reporter equipped with a small pigeon-cage was 
 formerly not a rare sight at public meetings from which he sent his 
 reports immediately to his paper by a pigeon messenger. The press 
 availed itself of pigeons especially for the purpose of reporting yacht 
 races, and some yachts were actually fitted with lofts. I am informed 
 by Japanese friends that pigeons were likewise employed by 
 newspapers in Japan. 
 
 The French were the first who ingeniously used carrier pigeons 
 for military purposes. During the siege of Paris in 1870 (till January 
 28, 1871) several hundred pigeons were placed at the disposal of the 
 military service by a Carrier Pigeon Club. The sole advices that 
 arrived at Paris from the outside world at that time were conveyed 
 by the wings of pigeons. A hundred and fifteen thousand official 
 dispatches and about a million private messages are said to have 
 
86 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 reached their destination in this manner. The dispatches were re- 
 produced on both sides of small films by means of microphotography ; 
 eighteen such films weighed a half gram, and contained from twelve 
 to sixteen large folio pages of news on an area of about a hundred 
 square centimetres. The contents of a complete number of the Times 
 could be accommodated in this space. About three thousand dis- 
 patches could be copied on each film. The films were rolled and 
 placed in a quill which was sealed and fastened to a tail-feather of a 
 pigeon by means of a fine wire fortified by a silk thread. For the 
 purpose of deciphering the incoming dispatches they were pro- 
 jected, considerably enlarged, on a screen, so that they could be 
 easily read and copied. The price of these air dispatches was half a 
 franc (ten cents) each word. Money orders also were sent out to the 
 extent of three hundred francs each. The average income from every 
 flight of a carrier pigeon amounted to 35,000 francs ($7,000). 
 
 During the World War, as is still within the memory of every one, 
 pigeons were extensively utilized and achieved brilliant records of 
 flight under great difficulties. A case of supreme endurance was noted 
 on October 21, 1918, when a carrier pigeon was released with an im- 
 portant message at Grand Pre" at 2:35 p.m. during intense machine- 
 gun and artillery fire. This bird delivered its message to the loft at 
 Rampont, a distance of 24.84 miles in twenty-five minutes. One of 
 its legs had been shot off, and its breast was injured by a machine-gun 
 bullet, but even under these conditions the bird did not fail to reach 
 its destination. For more information on the valorous deeds of pig- 
 eons in our army the National Geographic Magazine (January, 
 1926, pp. 86-91) may be consulted. The same article contains 
 twelve beautiful colored plates representing various breeds of 
 pigeons. 
 
 In warfare the service of pigeons will always remain indispensable. 
 Telephone and wireless communication are often interrupted in the 
 zone of advance, or may be put out of commission. Scouts and couri- 
 ers may be delayed or intercepted, optical signals obscured by rain, 
 smoke, or dust, and aerial observation hampered by unfavorable 
 weather conditions. Pigeons are not disturbed by bombardments, 
 fog, smoke, or dust, and will work regularly under almost any condi- 
 tions. In 1919 an area of Texas was wrecked by a storm, and a United 
 States Army relief-train was dispatched to Corpus Christi. Pigeons 
 carried on this train were released and braved storm and rain, bring- 
 ing the first news of conditions in the stricken area. Even for two 
 days after a radio had been set up and put in operation, the pigeons 
 
The Air Mail of Ancient Times 87 
 
 were the only means of conveying news from that district, as atmo- 
 spheric conditions crippled radio communication. 
 
 Pigeons are still bred and kept in large numbers for messenger 
 service and racing. They are useful for transmitting messages where- 
 ever communication by telegraph or telephone is not available. In 
 the beginning of this century there was still a real pigeon-mail be- 
 tween New Zealand and Great Barrier, a solitary and inhospitable 
 isle about ninety km distant from Auckland, whose colonists are en- 
 gaged in mining operations. A land-owner of this isle, Flicker by 
 name, hit upon the idea to establish a permanent daily pigeon-mail 
 with Auckland, as the mail-steamer ran but once a week. The letters 
 had to be written on a special form, and the postage from Great 
 Barrier to Auckland was twelve cents, in the opposite direction 
 twenty-five cents. The Dutch Government established a pigeon-post 
 system in Java and Sumatra early in the nineteenth century, the 
 birds being obtained from Baghdad. 
 
 At a trial flight conducted from Compiegne in France to Antwerp 
 a swallow previously distinguished by a special mark was released 
 simultaneously with several carrier pigeons. The bird immediately 
 took up its flight in the direction of Antwerp whence it had been 
 taken, while the pigeons, as they always do, first fluttered around to 
 find their bearings. The swallow made the way from Compiegne to 
 Antwerp (255 km) in sixty-eight minutes, which means that in one 
 minute it covered 3 % km, whereas the first pigeon arrived only 
 after three hours. The swallow therefore was about three times faster; 
 it would be the swiftest winged messenger, but unfortunately it can- 
 not be trained like a pigeon. 
 
 Amazing records of speed and endurance have been achieved by 
 pigeons. In good weather young birds will fly about three hundred 
 miles in from seven to nine hours, and flights of six hundred miles in 
 one day have been accomplished by older birds. This is the maximum 
 of a day's flight; in fact, only a very small percentage of the birds 
 will make five hundred miles in one day. During favorable weather 
 some pigeons will fly five hundred miles without stopping to eat or 
 drink. The distance from Dover to London (76 3^ miles by rail, 70 
 miles by air-line) was once covered by a carrier pigeon beating by 
 twenty minutes the express train which ran at a speed of sixty miles 
 an hour. 
 
NOTES 
 
 In regard to Shun as a flyer and user of a parachute compare E. 
 Chavannes, Les M£moires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, Vol. I, p. 74; 
 and J. Legge, Chinese Classics, Vol. Ill, Prolegomena, p. 114. 
 
 The K'ai yuan t'ien pao i shi (ch. A, p. 9) relates that the magician 
 Ye Fa-shan, who lived under the T'ang dynasty, had an iron mirror 
 which reflected objects like water; whenever a person was ill and 
 looked into this mirror, his interior organs became completely visible, 
 and revealed any obstructions that might be there; then he was 
 treated by means of drugs until he was completely cured. Cf . above, 
 p. 11. 
 
 The same work also contains the first notice of carrier pigeons 
 (p. 5) alluded to above on p. 71: "In his youth Chang Kiu-ling 
 kept in his house swarms of pigeons. When he had to correspond 
 with his relatives, he tied the letter to a pigeon's foot. The bird, 
 relying on the localities to which it had been trained, flew off and 
 delivered the letter. Chang Kiu-ling styled them 'flying slaves.' 
 His contemporaries were all filled with admiration." 
 
 The same work (ch. B, p. 24b) contains a curious story of a 
 swallow transmitting a letter: "At Ch'ang-an there was a man of 
 the people, Kwo Hing-sien by name, who had a daughter called 
 Shao Lan. She was married to a big merchant, Jen Tsung, who 
 pursued his trade in Siang (Hu-nan). For several years he was 
 absent from home, and no news from him had reached his family. 
 One day Shao Lan was in the living-room of her house and observed 
 a couple of swallows playing on the ridge-pole of the roof. She 
 heaved a long sigh and addressed the swallows, 'I have heard that 
 you swallows come from the east of the sea and return there and in 
 your constant migrations must pass through Siang. My husband 
 left home several years ago, and has not returned. There is no 
 tidings as to whether he is dead or alive, and I have no means of 
 knowing whether he exists or not. I trust to you to deliver a letter 
 to my husband.' When she had finished her speech, she burst into 
 tears. The swallows fluttered around, uttering sounds as though 
 responding to her request. Again, Lan spoke to them, 'If you wish 
 to be loyal to me, descend into my lap!' The swallows thereupon 
 flew on her lap, and with many sighs Lan recited the following 
 stanza: 'My husband has gone far away beyond the lakes; I am 
 almost in despair, mingling bloody tears with this message. Con- 
 
 88 
 
Notes 89 
 
 fidently I trust to the swallow's wings to transmit this letter to my 
 unfeeling husband.' Thereupon Lan committed this brief message 
 to writing and tied it to the foot of one of the swallows. These 
 emitted a sound and flew off. Jen Tsung then happened to be at 
 King-chou and suddenly noticed a swallow flying above him. He 
 was astounded when he saw the bird who alighted on his shoulder. 
 He observed that a tiny letter was attached to the bird's foot; he 
 released it and read his wife's message in verse. He was deeply 
 moved and shed tears. The swallow rose into the air and flew off. 
 The following year Jen Tsung returned home and showed Shao Lan 
 the verses which she had written. Subsequently the scholar Chang 
 Yiie (a well-known poet, A.D. 667-730) recorded this story to have 
 it preserved as a curiosity of literature." 
 
 Chao, an emperor of the Han dynasty, while hunting in a park, 
 shot a wild goose and found a piece of cloth attached to one of its 
 feet. It contained a message to the effect that Su Wu and his com- 
 panions were in a certain marsh in the country of the Hiung-nu. 
 Messengers were at once dispatched to the Hiung-nu to demand 
 the release of the prisoners who had been believed to be dead (P£til- 
 lon, Allusions, p. 505; Giles, Biogr. Diet., p. 685). 
 
 The first who made the passage from the Ti wang shi ki known 
 was G. Schlegel (Chinesische Brauche und Spiele in Europa, p. 32, 
 Breslau, 1869). Schegel, in the same manner as I, takes Ki-kung-shi 
 (wrongly written by him Ki-kwang-shi) as the name of an individual, 
 but draws an erroneous conclusion from this text when he observes 
 the "the air-balloon invented in Europe in 1872 was assuredly known 
 to the ancient Chinese." The Chinese "flying chariot" has nothing to 
 do with a balloon which is based on the principle of a bag filled with 
 heated air or hydrogen gas; such a contrivance was not known to the 
 Chinese at any time, notwithstanding what has been written to the 
 contrary. Professor Giles, in the article quoted below, justly remarks, 
 "No credence whatever should be given to the absurd story of the 
 French missionary, Father Besson, who is said to have written in 
 1694, stating that a balloon had ascended from Peking at the coro- 
 nation of Fo Kien in 1306. No emperor was crowned in 1306, and no 
 such emperor is known to Chinese history as Fo Kien." 
 
 H. A. Giles, Traces of Aviation in Ancient China (in his Adver- 
 saria Sinica, Vol. I, No. 8, 1910, pp. 229-236), cites all texts relative 
 to the Ki-kung flying chariot, save the one from the Ti wang shi ki. 
 It is noteworthy that the Ts'e Yuan (under "flying chariot") quotes 
 
90 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 only the latter, which apparently is the most important, but omits the 
 Po wu chi, Shu i ki, and Kin lou tse. 
 
 As in European folk-lore, so in China also rocks of peculiar shape, 
 bells, statues, swords, and other objects are credited with a magic 
 power of flight. "A rock which arrived flying" (fei lai shi) is shown 
 on the sacred Mount T'ai in Shan-tung. Flying swords are mentioned 
 in the romance of the Three Kingdoms (Brewitt-Taylor, San Kuo, 
 Vol. II, p. 311). "Flying scissors" {fei lai tsien) of cast iron are 
 figured and described by L. Gaillard (Croix et Swastika en Chine, 
 1893, p. 217). 
 
 Good information on Korean and Japanese kites will be found in 
 the interesting book of Stewart Culin, Korean Games with Notes on 
 the Corresponding Games of China and Japan, pp. 9-21 (Philadel- 
 phia, 1895) ; see also W. M tiller, Der Papierdrachen in Japan (Stutt- 
 gart, 1914), who deals well with the construction of Japanese kites. 
 
 Those interested in the subject of kite-fishing may consult H. 
 Balfour, Kite-fishing, in Essays and Studies Presented to William 
 Ridgeway (1913), pp. 583-608, and H. Plischke, Der Fischdrachen, 
 published by Museum fur Volkerkunde, Leipzig, No. 6, 1922. In this 
 monograph the distribution of kite-fishing and the use of kites for 
 fishing in Indonesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia are set forth in detail. 
 The author also regards China as the home of the kite whence it 
 spread to Indonesia and the South Sea Islands on the one hand and to 
 Europe on the other hand. His statement (p. 36) that the earliest 
 Chinese references to the kite belong to the second and fifth centuries 
 B.C., however, is erroneous; he has been misled by De Groot (Religi- 
 ous System of China, Vol. Ill, p. 665), who misinterprets the wooden 
 bird mentioned by Mo Ti as a kite. 
 
 In the Panchakyanaka, a Jaina recension of the Panchatantra, 
 we also find the story of the Weaver as Vishnu (translated by J. 
 Hertel, Indische Marchen, 1921, p. 92); in this version, the Garuda 
 airship is set in motion by a push of the elbows. 
 
 The story of the Bodhisatva as a divine horse rescuing merchants 
 from flesh-devouring ogres by carrying them from Ceylon to India, 
 traversing the clouds and passing the sea to the other side, is contained 
 in the Valahassa Jataka (Jataka No. 196) and Hiian Tsang's account 
 (S. Beal, Buddhist Records of the Western World, Vol. II, p. 242). 
 
 The influences of Greece on India are set forth in a good summary 
 by Count Goblet d'Alviella in his book Ce que l'lnde doit a la Grece: 
 des influences classiques dans la civilisation de l'lnde (2nd ed., Paris, 
 1926). While art, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy are duly 
 
Notes 91 
 
 considered, mechanics and references to airships are passed over with 
 silence. 
 
 Sylvain Levi, however, in his treatise Quid de Graecis veterum 
 Indorum monumenta tradiderint (Paris, 1890, p. 24), has thus 
 referred to the Yavana airship: "Memorandus tandem ille Yavana 
 qui machinam per aera volantem construxerat, ut Candis principem 
 tolleret." 
 
 In regard to the myth of Etana see G. Hiising, Zum Etana 
 Mythos, Archiv fitr Religionswissenschaft, 1903, p. 149, and Die ira- 
 nische Ueberlieferung (1909), pp. 39, 100; M. Jastrow, Another Frag- 
 ment of the Etana Myth, Journal American Oriental Society, 1910, 
 pp. 101-129; B. Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, Vol. II (1925), 
 pp. 189-191. The British Museum seal representing Etana's bold 
 flight is figured and described by P. S. P. Handcock, Mesopotamian 
 Archaeology (1912), pp. 297-298. W. H. Ward, The Seal Cylinders 
 of Western Asia, pp. 142-148 (Washington, Carnegie Institution, 
 1910), describes five seals with this subject. 
 
 The story of Kai Kawus is also recorded in the Bundahishn (trans- 
 lated by E. W. West in Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XXXVII, 
 pp. 220-223) and in the Arabic History of the Kings of Persia by 
 Al-Tha'alibi, translated by H. Zotenberg (Histoire des rois des Perses, 
 1900, p. 167). The Arabic chronicler gives the case a more theological 
 flavor by making Kai Kawus construct the tower of Babylon whence 
 he takes his skyward flight. After his fall he demands milk and water 
 from the people who have come to his rescue, and that locality was 
 therefore called Siraf ("Milk and Water"). In the same work (p. 13) 
 is found the story of King Jemshed constructing a chariot of teak and 
 ivory which is transported by demons through the air and in which 
 he flies from Donbawand to Babylon in a single day. 
 
 Hodgson errs in tracing Godwin's bird-airship (p. 61) to Lucian, 
 who in fact has nothing of the kind. All that Lucian offers in regard 
 to air voyages is given above (p. 64), and these are effected by means 
 of wings, not of birds. Feldhaus is mistaken in permitting the Baby- 
 lonian tradition of the flying Etana to migrate into Persia without 
 even knowing the story of the Shahnameh. Etana, however, accom- 
 plishes flight merely by mounting a bird, while the Persian king Kai 
 Kawus flies comfortably seated in a vehicle drawn by four eagles who 
 supply the motor. The two traditions are entirely distinct and not 
 interrelated. 
 
 The old yarn of Simon the Magician as having attempted, at the 
 time of Nero, a flight which ended in failure, is still warmed up in 
 
92 The Prehistory of Aviation 
 
 many books, recently again by C. L. M. Brown (p. 7). Suetonius 
 (Nero, 12) reports nothing about a flight, still less lisps a word about a 
 flight of Simon. He writes merely that at a performance of the story 
 of Icarus in the theatre an actor (a petaurista or petauristarius) had 
 a fatal accident and collapsed on a spot near the emperor whom he 
 covered with his blood; the question is of a stage disaster, not of a 
 flight. Only mediaeval legend connects Simon with a flight achieved 
 with the devil's assistance. Arnobius, writing about the year 300 of 
 our era, says that the people of Rome saw the chariot of Simon Magus 
 and his four fiery horses blown away by the mouth of Peter and 
 vanish at the name of Christ. Cyril of Jerusalem (315-386) speaks of 
 Simon's being borne in the air in the chariot of demons, and is not 
 surprised that the combined prayers of Peter and Paul brought him 
 down. Finally in the Didascalia Apostolorum, an apocryphal work 
 extant in Syriac and Latin, Peter finds Simon at Rome drawing many 
 away from the church as well as seducing the gentiles by his "magic 
 operation and virtues." Peter then states that one day he saw Simon 
 flying through the air, but by virtue of his prayer Simon fell and 
 broke the arch of his foot. In another, Greek version of the legend 
 Simon announced his flight in the theatre. While all eyes were turned 
 on him, Peter prayed against him. Meanwhile Simon mounted aloft 
 into mid-air, borne up, Peter says, by demons, and telling the people 
 that he was ascending to heaven, whence he would return bringing 
 them good tidings. The people applauded him as a god, but Peter 
 stretched forth his hands to heaven, supplicating God through Jesus 
 to dash down the corrupter and curtail the power of the demons. 
 He asked, however, that Simon might not be killed by his fall, but 
 merely bruised. Thereupon Simon fell with a great commotion and 
 bruised his bottom and the soles of his feet (compare L. Thorndike, 
 History of Magic and Experimental Science, Vol. I, p. 422). All this 
 is freely invented legend for a dogmatic purpose and has nothing to 
 do with a real attempt at flight. 
 
 In regard to the letter of Prester John see the critical discussion 
 of L. Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, Vol. II, 
 pp. 240-245, a book that is to be highly recommended for its 
 thorough, judicious, and critical scholarship. 
 
 The chapter "The Air Mail of Ancient Times" is the most com- 
 prehensive historical study of carrier pigeons thus far written. An 
 interesting article on Chinese lore of pigeons is by T. Watters, 
 Chinese Notions about Pigeons and Doves, in Journal China Branch 
 Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. IV, 1868, pp. 225-242. No reference to 
 
Notes 93 
 
 carrier pigeons is made in this article, although the name of Chang 
 Kiu-ling is mentioned. Those interested in Chinese pigeon whistles 
 may consult my article on the subject in The Scientific American, 
 1908, p. 394, where also the process of making the whistles is de- 
 scribed with illustrations of examples and of the tools used in making 
 them. In regard to pigeon breeds in general see W. B. Tegetmeier, 
 Pigeons: Their Structure, Varieties, Habits, and Management, Lon- 
 don, 1868 (with colored plates). 
 
 The Oriental origin of Greek carrier pigeons is upheld by H. Diels, 
 Antike Technik (1914), pp. 68-69; see also my review of this book in 
 American Anthropologist , 1917, pp. 71-75. There is an interesting 
 article by F. Kluge, Die Heimat der Brieftaube, reprinted in his 
 Bunte Blatter (Freiburg, 1908), pp. 145-154. The author of this 
 article quotes chiefly from early German pilgrimages to Palestine to 
 prove the Oriental origin of the pigeon-mail. He justly emphasizes 
 the point that the ancients employed pigeons as messengers only 
 incidentally and occasionally. L. Rauwolf's Beschreibung der Raiss 
 inn die Morgenlander (1583), p. 215, may be added to his German 
 sources. Compare also Gaudefroy-Demombynes, La Syrie a l'^poque 
 des Mamelouks d'apres les auteurs arabes (1923), pp. 250-254. 
 
 In his charming story "Legend of Prince Ahmed Al Kamel or, 
 The Pilgrim of Love" inserted in his The Alhambra, Washington 
 Irving has skilfully combined the Oriental motives of talking birds, 
 knowledge of birds' speech on the part of the prince, the courier, 
 pigeon carrying love letters (that "trustiest of messengers"), the en- 
 chanted horse, and the flying carpet of Solomon on which the lovers 
 elope. Thomas Moore, in The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, alludes 
 to Solomon's silken rug in the lines — 
 
 Waved, like the wings of the white birds that fan 
 The flying throne of star-taught Soliman — 
 
 and comments that when Solomon travelled, he had a carpet of green 
 silk on which his throne was placed, being of a prodigious length and 
 breadth, and sufficient for all his forces to stand upon, the men plac- 
 ing themselves on his right hand and the spirits on his left; and that 
 when all were in order, the wind, at his command, took up the carpet, 
 and transported it with all that were upon it, wherever he pleased; 
 the army of birds at the same time flying over their heads, and form- 
 ing a sort of canopy to shade them from the sun. The same motif is 
 frequently referred to in the mediaeval Midrash literature. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES 
 
 Bell, Alexander Graham. — The Tetrahedral Principle in Kite Structure. 
 National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XIV, 1903, pp. 219-251. 
 
 Aerial Locomotion. National Geographic Magazine, 1907, pp. 1-34. 
 
 Dr. Bell's Man-Lifting Kite. National Geographic Magazine, 1908, 
 pp. 35-52. 
 
 Brown, C. L. M. — The Conquest of the Air, an Historical Survey. London, Oxford 
 University Press, 1927. 
 
 Chanute, O. — Progress in Flying Machines. New York, 1899. 
 
 Feldhaus, F. M. — Ruhmesblatter der Technik. Leipzig, 1910. 
 Leonardo der Techniker und Erfinder. Jena, 1913. 
 
 Hart, Ivor B. — The Mechanical Investigations of Leonardo da Vinci. Chicago, 
 Open Court Publishing Co., 1925. 240p. 
 
 Chap. VII: Leonardo da Vinci as a Pioneer of Aviation. 
 
 Hodgson, J. E. — The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain from the Earliest 
 Times to the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century. 150 illustrations. Oxford 
 University Press, London, Humphrey Milford, 1924. 436p. 
 
 Lana, Francesco (Bresciano). — Prodromo overo saggio di alcune inventioni 
 nuove premesso all'arte maestra. Brescia, 1670. 252p. 20 plates. 
 
 Copy in Library of Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago. 
 
 Chap. VI: Fabricare una nave, che camini sostentata sopra 1'aria a remi 
 e a vele; quale si dimostra poter riuscire nella prattica ("To manufacture a ship 
 which travels supported above the air by means of oars and sails: it is demon- 
 strated that this is feasible in practice"). 
 
 Wilkins, John. — Mathematicall Magick or, The "Wonders that may be performed 
 by Mechanicall Geometry." In Two Books. Concerning Mechanicall Powers, 
 Motions. Being one of the most easie, pleasant, usefull, (and yet most ne- 
 glected) part of Mathematicks. Not before treated of in this language. By 
 J. W. M. A. London, printed by M. F. for Sa. Gellibrand at the brasen 
 Serpent in Pauls Church-yard, 1648. 269p. 
 
 Copy in Library of Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago. 
 Book II is entitled "Daedalus, or Mechanicall Motions." 
 
 94 
 
INDEX 
 
 Aelianus, 74. 
 
 Aerial top, Chinese, 42. 
 
 Air bombardments, 12-13, 22, 47. 
 
 Airship, Chinese conception of, 17; 
 
 Indian conception of, 46 
 Alchemy, in China, 26, 28; in Asia 
 
 and Europe, 30. 
 Alexander the Great, romance of, 60, 
 
 62, 69. 
 Alexandria, carrier pigeons at, 80, 81. 
 Anti-aircraft practice, first example of, 
 
 35. 
 Arabian Nights, 77, 78. 
 Arabs, attempts at flying by, 65-67; 
 
 organizers of pigeon-posts, 77-80. 
 Archytas, flying dove of, 23, 37, 64. 
 Ariosto, 83. 
 Aziz, Egyptian Caliph, first recipient of 
 
 parcels by air mail, 78. 
 Avril, P., 81. 
 
 Bacon, Roger, 68-70. 
 
 Baden-Powell, man-lifting kite of, 42. 
 
 Baghdad, centre of pigeon-mail, 78; 
 
 pigeons of, 84, 87. 
 Bate, J., description of kite by, 38. 
 Baveru Jataka, 76. 
 Belgium, carrier pigeons in, 85. 
 Bell, A. G., 13, 42. 
 Beybars, air mail organized by, 79. 
 Bird-men, Chinese, 15. 
 Birds, used by navigators to spy land, 
 
 76. 
 Bladud, aerial flight of, 14. 
 Boots, magic, 53-54. 
 Bow, musical, attached to kites, 33, 37. 
 Breathing, art of, 29. 
 Brihat Katha Clokasamgraha, 48. 
 
 Caesar, 75. 
 
 Cairo, carrier pigeons at, 79, 80. 
 
 Carrier pigeons, history of, 71-87. 
 
 Cayley, Sir George, 42. 
 
 Centipede kite, 32. 
 
 Chang Kiu-ling, first Chinese who kept 
 
 and trained carrier pigeons, 71, 88. 
 Chanute, O., 31, 32. 
 Cock, Indian airship in the form of, 49. 
 Crane, vehicle of flyers, 26, 27. 
 Crusades, carrier pigeons used during, 
 
 75, 82-84. 
 Cyrano de Bergerac, 64, 65. 
 
 Daedalus, 9, 62-63. 
 Dallam, T., 80. 
 Damian, John, 67-68. 
 Danti, G. B., 67. 
 Darwin, C, 84. 
 
 Darwin, E., 13. 
 
 Dirigible airships, in Indian tradition, 
 
 47. 
 Dragons, as vehicles of aerial flights, 
 
 18, 69. 
 
 Eagles, carrying an airship, 59, 62. 
 Elixir, promoting flight, 26, 30. 
 Enchanted horse, 55. 
 England, carrier pigeons in, 85; kite 
 
 used in, 38. 
 Etana, 58, 91. 
 
 Fire-crackers, in connection with kites, 
 
 33. 
 Flutes, connected with kites, 33. 
 Flying elixir, 30. 
 Flying horse, 55-56. 
 Flying shoes, 28. 
 
 Flying Taoist saint, on painting, 28. 
 France, use of carrier pigeons in, 85-86. 
 Franklin, Benjamin, experiments of 
 
 with a kite, 39. 
 Frontinus, 75. 
 
 Gandharva marriage, 47. 
 
 Garuda airship, 6, 47, 50, 51. 
 
 Giles, H. A., on Chinese airship, 20, 89. 
 
 Glanvill, J., 13. 
 
 Godwin, F., bird airship of, 61, 65, 91. 
 
 Goose, as messenger, 73, 89. 
 
 Greeks, carrier pigeons among, 74-75; 
 flying among, 62-65; regarded in India 
 as the inventors of a type of airship, 
 49-52. 
 
 Gunavarman, 46. 
 
 Harshacharita, 50. 
 
 Harun al-Rashid, pigeon-post of, 77. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 30. 
 
 Hodgson, J. E., author of History of 
 
 Aeronautics in Great Britian, 8, 34, 
 
 43, 61, 67, 70, 91. 
 Holland, carrier pigeons in, 85. 
 Huang Ti, 18, 19. 
 
 India, carrier pigeons in, 73; conception 
 of airships in, 46-52, 55-57; kites in, 
 37. 
 
 Irving, Washington, 65, 93. 
 
 Jatakas, 46, 53, 55. 
 Jivaka, 11. 
 
 Kai Kawus, flying Persian king, 59, 91. 
 K'ai yuan t'ien pao i shi, three texts 
 
 translated from, 88. 
 Katha Sarit Sagara, 48, 52, 53. 
 Ki-kung, maker of flying chariot, 19. 
 
 95 
 
96 
 
 Index 
 
 Kibaga, flying warrior of Uganda, 12. 
 Kircher, A., acquainted with kites, 37, 
 
 41. 
 Kite, contest, 32; for catching fish, 36; 
 
 in England, 38; in India, 37; in Italy, 
 
 37; in Polynesia, 36; in Siam, 37; 
 
 paper, 31, 35; ridden by men, 40; 
 
 wooden, 23, 25. 
 Kites, history of, 31-43. 
 K'ii Yuan, Chinese poet, air-journey of, 
 
 17. 
 Kung-shu Tse, 23, 24. 
 
 Lana, Francesco, airship of, 2, 21, 22, 
 65; flying birds made by, 25; on 
 kites, 37. 
 
 Lanterns, attached to kites, 30. 
 
 Lei Kung, Chinese god of thunder, 16. 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci, aeroplanes of, 70; 
 parachute of, 15. 
 
 Li Sao, first description of an air- 
 journey in, 17. 
 
 Li Ye, inventor of musical kite, 33. 
 
 Linschoten, 73, 81. 
 
 Logan, J., 13. 
 
 Lu Pan, 23, 24. 
 
 Lucian, 64, 76, 91. 
 
 Mackintosh, bird airship of, 62. 
 
 Magic boots, 28, 53-54. 
 
 Mao Mong, 18. 
 
 Masudi, 78. 
 
 Mercury, in alchemy, 30. 
 
 Mesopotamia, flying in, 58; home of 
 
 domesticated pigeon, 75. 
 Mirror, showing interior organs of body, 
 , ,11, 88. 
 Mo Ti, 23. 
 Mongols, 74, 79. 
 Moore, Thomas, 71, 84, 93. 
 "Music on the air," produced by kites, 
 
 33; produced by pigeon whistles, 72. 
 
 Noah, dove of, 76. 
 
 Nur-ed-din, air mail organized by, 78. 
 
 Oliver of Malmesbury, 67. 
 
 Panchatantra, 46. 
 
 Parachute, first used by Shun, 14; of 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci, 15. 
 Parcel post by air mail, first example 
 
 in tenth century, 78. 
 Passenger airship, in India, 50. 
 Pei Ti, 18. 
 Persia, carrier pigeons in, 73-74; flying 
 
 architect of, 66; tradition of airship 
 
 drawn by eagles in, 59-60. 
 Pigeon whistles, 72, 93. 
 Pliny, 75, 76. 
 
 Po Ku-i, flying shoes of, 28. 
 Po wu chi, 19 
 
 Rabelais, 64, 84. 
 
 Regiomontanus, 25. 
 
 Reuter, pigeon-post of, 85. 
 
 Roentgen rays, idea of anticipated in 
 China and India, 11-12, 88. 
 
 Romans, carrier pigeons among, 75. 
 
 Rukh, the giant bird, first air-bom- 
 bardier, 12. 
 
 Schlegel, G., 89. 
 
 Shahnameh, 59, 60. 
 
 Shakespeare, 84. 
 
 Shan hai king, 19. 
 
 Shun, Chinese emperor, first flyer re- 
 corded in history, 14, 88. 
 
 Si Wang Mu, flying on crane's back, 27. 
 
 Siddhi Kur, 47. 
 
 Signalling, by means of kites, 34, 35. 
 
 Simon the Magician, 91-92. 
 
 Solar ship, conception of in India, 
 Egypt, and Greece, 46. 
 
 Spinning Damsel, 16. 
 
 Stanley, story of flying Uganda warrior 
 recorded by, 12. 
 
 Strutt, J., 38. 
 
 Sulphur, in alchemy, 30. 
 
 Sun Pin, flying shoes of, 28. 
 
 Swallow, Chinese story of transmitting 
 a letter, 88; speed of compared with 
 carrier pigeon, 87. 
 
 Swift, 61, 64. 
 
 Symon Semeon, 80. 
 
 Syria, pigeon-post in, 78. 
 
 Tasso, 83. 
 
 Thorndike, L., 69, 92. 
 Thousand-league boots, 28, 54. 
 Ti wang shi ki, 19, 89. 
 Tiger, vehicle of flyers, 27. 
 Ts'in Shi, mirror of, 11. 
 Turks, kite-flying among, 37. 
 
 Uganda warrior, flyer and air-bombar- 
 dier, 12. 
 Uncles, M., eagle airship of, 62. 
 
 Wayland the Smith, 63. 
 
 Weaver as Vishnu, story of, 46, 90. 
 
 Wells, H. G., on Daedalus story, 9. 
 
 Wilkins, J., 9, 22. 
 
 Wilson, A., scientific experiments of 
 
 with kites, 39. 
 Wind-driven chariot, in China, 19; in 
 
 India, 45. 
 World War, carrier pigeons in, 86. 
 
 Yavana airship, 49, 50, 51. 
 Ye Fa-shan, magician, 88. 
 Yoga practice, 53. 
 Yogins, 30. 
 Pocock, G., kite-chariot of, 21, 41. Yji yang tsa tsu, 73. 
 
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Field Museum of Natural History Anthropology, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Plate IV 
 
 t 
 
 KI-KUNG'S FLYING CHARIOT (p. 20) 
 Chinese Woodcut from T'u shu tai ch'eng 
 
Field Museum of Natural History 
 
 Anthropology, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Plate V 
 
 FRANCESCO LANA'S FLYING BOAT (p. 21) 
 From Lana's Prodrorao, 1670 
 
Field Museum of Natural History 
 
 Anthropology, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 , Plate VT 
 
 FLYING TAOIST SAINT (p. 28) 
 
 Chinese Landscape in Ink from General Munthe Collection 
 
 now in Los Angeles Museum 
 
Field Museum of Natural History 
 
 Anthropology, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Plate VII 
 
 \*v--~ 
 
 THE GODDESS SI WANG MU FLYING ASTRIDE A CRANE (p. 27) 
 
 Scene from an Embroidered Chinese Screen of the K'ang-hi Period (1662-1722) in 
 
 Blackstone Collection of Field Museum 
 
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 5 £ g 
 
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Field Museum of Natural History 
 
 Anthropology, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Plate IX 
 
 EARLIEST ENGLISH ILLUSTRATION OF A KITE (p. 38) 
 From John Bates' The Mysteries of Nature and Art, 1634 
 
Field Museum of Natural History 
 
 Anthropology, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Plate X 
 
 TWO APSARASES OR HEAVENLY NYMPHS FLYING DOWNWARD 
 
 AND SURROUNDING THE BUDDHA AMITABHA (p. 52) 
 
 Marble Sculpture with Votive Inscription Yielding Date A.D. 677 
 
 Blackstone Chinese Collection of Field Museum 
 

Field Museum of Natural History 
 
 Anthropology, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Plate XI 
 
 
 ;>1 
 
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 ct -^<'j'// n^?£-*0 
 
 \i'~<.>'»ji^ ^=£'A^«. i/'> t.&y*\ p uJt'fw 
 
 KAI KAWUS FLIGHT TO HEAVEN (p. 60) 
 
 From a Persian Illustrated Manuscript of the Shahnameh, Dated 1587-88 
 
 Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 
 
Field Museum of Natural History Anthropology, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Plate XII 
 
 THE AERIAL VOYAGE OF DOMINGO GONSALES (p. 61) 
 From F. Godwin's Man in the Moone, 1638