FLIGHT is a new mental and physical experience. It transposes one to a world of action and emotion in direct contrast to much of what one feels and lives on the hard surface of the globe. It tends to exhilarate and exalt the mind; it changes the registry and the workings of a number of the human senses; and it breathes into the body an overflowing measure of health, endurance, and power. The feeling of triumph over the forces of the air, in the face of nature's expanding majesty and mystery, is one of the most irresistible charms that have ever taken captive the human imagination. Triumphant flight thrills one with the feeling that his powers are something more than human, more than man.

      But in the first stage of learning how to fly, one is oppressed with a feeling of helplessness and a fear of danger comparable to that of a child learning to walk. The aëronaut must train his mind to fly before he can get his airship to work. I can best illustrate this mental fact by briefly describing the relation between mind and body in the experience of the gymnast. After years of practice as gymnast, I was never able to turn a double somersault without definitely willing the act and drawing in my mind a clear picture of the revolutions of my body in the air before rising from the leaping board. Indeed. I had to see the whole physical performance and something of the mental concept, too, before attempting the feat. I might leap with sufficient power and at the requisite altitude to perform this rather difficult feat, but my mind was never able to resolve upon it and execute it while my body was moving, unsupported, through space.

      Every difficult gymnastic feat requires mental deliberation in advance, for the mind cannot suddenly and radically divert its course of action on a plane where it has, because of the force of gravity, not learned to feel at home. This mental handicap has, until very recently, blocked the path to the discovery of the law of flight. In one of my first balloon ascen- sions, years ago, I discovered that the basket in which I sat was parting from the gas bag. I was at an altitude of 4,000 feet, and, unless I could climb a swaying rigging to tie a rope some ten feet above my head, I seemed to be doomed. With one hand I seized a parachute for the emergency, and attempted to mount the rigging — I fell back in the basket, as I had in my gymnastic practices often fallen from a tight rope. Then I determined to leap from the basket. In my hurry I did not open the parachute, so I fell like a stone, and the thing that I most vividly recall in that descent was that my mouth was wide open; I could not close it, and the rush of the air into it was strangling me. I was being drowned in the air. But the parachute finally opened; at that moment I was able to close my mouth, as the fall was broken. But mental effort to close my mouth, though powerless till the parachute opened and broke the force of gravity, was so intense that, when my mouth did close, my teeth. badly cut my tongue. How I was able to hold on to the parachute on its suddenly opening I don't know; but the incident taught me that to fly one must master to a large extent the force of habit of gravity in his own person.

      There are plenty of mechanics who can build airships that can fly. The great trouble is that there are very few men who have the gymnastic gift to fly; for flight, until it is completely mastered, is a terrific struggle with both mental and physical gravity, or the habits that gravity has imposed upon the mind and body, on the earth plane. If one will study closely the accidents that have overtaken airships in actual flight within the last year or two, he will see that most of them have been due more to a lack of skill in manipulation than to defects in construction of these craft. The fact is, we don't know, we can't know until we can handle these craft, what their shortcomings really are. That is why I maintain, contrary to the opinion of some authorities, that ballooning is so essential to the science of aëronautics. It trains the aëronaut or aviator to handle an airship, by teaching him to feel at home in the air.

      Every scrap of knowledge of aëronautics that we possess to-day has come from three classes of persons: theoretical scientists, like Professor Graham Bell and the late Professor Langley; mechanics, like the Wright brothers, Mr. Lillienthal, Sir Hiram Maxim, Mr. A. M. Herring, Mr. G. H. Curtiss, and Count Zeppelin; and the gymnasts. The Wright brothers have been eminently successful, because with their mechanical genius they have combined fair gifts as gymnasts. Without doubt, Mr. A. M. Herring has built an aëroplane that will fly, but no one is flying in it. As I have said, the aëronaut has to combat the mental and physical habits of gravity that he carries with him into an airship, and not any increase of gravity itself. There is less pull ten feet from the ground than there is on top of the Eiffel Tower. No sooner does one begin to feel the least bit at home on an airship than he realizes that some portion of the weight that has so long held his body to the earth has been lifted. As the ship mounts higher and higher, a great weight, or at least the feeling of a great weight, is discarded. This is not always a pleasant sensation, for the body is not always prepared to adjust itself readily to such a radical change. I have had my blood vessels swell to abnormal size, and the blood gush from the ears and nose, an experience common to mountain climbers. But the mountain climber is never free from the oppressive pull of the earth, whereas the aëronaut is soon able to balance his breathing and his other physical and mental processes with the reduced pull and pressure from without.

      When one begins to feel at ease on an airship as on a speeding railroad train or steamship and it is surprising how soon that feeling comes with successful flight the elimination of the force of gravity affects the habits of gravity. The mind's freedom is denoted by an enormous increase of energy and power of action. The gravity of every square inch of the plane on which one stands or sits, and of every ounce of one's body, have been neutralized by a buoyancy of a gas lighter than air or by mechanical force and pressure upon the air. On the gas airship this feeling of having overcome gravity is even more perceptible than on the mechanical aëroplane, just as the feeling of stability on a solid rock is more real than the feeling of stability on a rolling surface of water. But no two persons, perhaps, are affected by this experience to the same degree. After spending a few hours at an altitude of two miles in an airship, I have felt as if I could walk on naked space with all the steadiness I walk on the street, or that I could step from cloud to cloud as I have stepped from stone to stone in the bed of a shallow rivulet. In every atom of my mind and body I felt the capacity and power of flight. My feet seemed barely to touch the deck of the ship. At three miles in the air I have put one of my feet out on the sea of space, or let my body hang well over the side of the ship. Instead of a feeling of dizziness and a fear of falling, as from a high building, I experienced a feeling of buoyancy like floating on the water.

      When this feeling in its full power had possession of me, I never had a serious accident. I recall that, making a short experimental flight with a dirigible about a year ago at Poughkeepsie, the propellers were caught in some rope as the ship rose. It at once shot up to a surprisingly high altitude and sailed off for about two miles to the south. All this time I had been working to get my motors to operating properly. Of a sudden the ship halted in the teeth of a contrary air current, and began to whirl like a gyroscope. I had been caught in an infant whirlwind, which seemed to be more violent overhead. I could throw off some ballast and go up with balloon power and escape, but I felt the sport of real flight in my blood, and I determined to disentangle my propellers, connect the machinery, and get out of this whirlwind by motor-power, if possible. Amidst the indistinguishable mass of whirling ropes and spars and beams and the continuous roar of the wind on the gas bag as loud as the loudest thunder, I finally got the propellers free and the motors connected.

      But no sooner did the blades begin to spin than the ship made a dive downward at an angle of almost sixty degrees and the prow was headed directly for the top of an oak tree on the edge of the ground, about five hundred yards away. If my ship should be wrecked on that tree, it would not only be a serious financial loss, but a far more serious loss — the loss of all the self-confidence I had gained in long years of experience in the air, because I felt from the moment that the ship began to descend I held it firmly in my grip. It was moving at terrific speed. I pressed gently on the lever of the planes and the ship instantly obeyed. I have not words to describe my thrill of power and triumph when I felt and saw the ship in its headlong flight to apparent destruction yielding to my will. I held firmly in the hollow of my hand the power to overcome gravity, and for the first time I made several daring circles around a tree.

      The aëronaut brings a measure of this power from the heavens down to the earth with him as he alights from his ship. After a long voyage one touches the ground with the feeling that he can step over tall buildings, leap broad rivers, and fly from place to place. His tread upon the ground is like walking upon bags of wool. This fact explains why so small a percentage of persons who fall in flight are killed. This apparent lightness and buoyancy remains in the very bones for many hours after one has made a protracted aërial voyage, and lures one back to the height of the air. It is a sensation of pleasure that the great majority of humanity have yet to know.

      In some mysterious way breathing and gravity are associated. By the power of inflating its lungs with air, the bird is more enabled to fly than by the use of its wings. As one ascends in the air, the increased necessity and power to breathe are as evident as the decrease of gravity within this increased. power to breathe, there is a still more increased power to control the breath. One feels in these moments of overcoming gravity that his breath is completely under his will as never before. To many persons the first experience in going high in the air is that one cannot get enough breath, as the mountain climber feels. This is followed by a feeling that the lungs have become immense spherical bellows, capable of inhaling and exhaling several square acres of space. By no very fantastic effort of the imagination, I have felt like a huge, globular breath, floating in space.

      Man may fly in a motor-run machine as the bird does with its wings. He may float in the air by hanging to an inflated gas bag, which may correspond to the inflated lungs of a bird, but, if he is ever to become supreme master of the air, his breath must be as completely under his control as the movements of his hand. The overcoming of the feelings and habits of gravity and the control of the breath seem to me to be interdependent in flights. But this phase of flight is yet too subtle to have its great importance more than alluded to at this time.

      The influence of even sporadic flight on the physical body and the health is remarkable. In balloon voyages I have been in the air as long as four days at a time. Once I made a voyage almost an invalid from rheumatism. I could scarcely raise my arms on a level with my head. My blood was black. The doctor would not permit me to taste meat. Within a few hours every drop of blood in my body had become a bright red liquid, looking like flame, and I seemed unable to appease my appetite for strong animal food of which I had none too much aboard. From the tortures of rheumatism that voyage conveyed me to the tortures of hunger.

      I went to see a friend who was very low with consumption. I told him to go with me on a voyage and he would come back a well man. He shook his head, but I was persistent. At last he went, and for the first two hours in the air I thought he would bleed to death with hemorrhages. I felt like a murderer. But soon he began to change. The voyage was from St. Louis to the Atlantic Coast. That was twenty years ago. He went back home and is still living, a robust man. I had another friend who cured a very bad case of iron and copper dust in the lungs by a few balloon voyages.

      There is no such thing as air sickness. The air has a general motion like the water, and, like the water, its waves are disturbed and broken into billows. Its waves are twice as long as the water waves, but, because of its great elasticity, its disturbance and commotion do not cause sea sickness. I have never navigated the air without being impressed with its great superiority as man's natural highway. It possesses a new freedom, a new poetry; but it also possesses a frightful fury before which the stoutest heart must quail. I have never gone aboard of an airship on the calmest day without first searching the heavens in all directions and studying every breeze that touched my face, or the tree tops, or the clouds. And with every precaution, I have been often deceived, so often that I have sometimes believed that the air was capable of premeditated treachery. To me the air is far more mysterious than the earth or the sea.

      In the air there is no solitude, no loneliness, even for the dullest imagination. The rapid succession of vast scenic illusions, both by day and by night, crowding upon a mind from which the gray veil of the earth has been rent or lifted, is enough to thrill a stoic. As one climbs into the heavens on a cloudless day, say to an altitude of three miles, he looks out upon an earth panorama of nearly three hundred miles in diameter. To the eye the earth has become a huge, concave hemisphere, meeting the heavens on a level with the eye. In the spring and summer this hemisphere is a deep, dark green, streaked, dotted, and studded with myriad lights and shadows of cities, rivers, mountains, fields, and lakes. Every change in the position of the airship produces a thousand changes in the lights and shadows on this vast canvas, which in October is brown and in December is gray. It is a gigantic, whirling kaleidoscope.

      First we shall fly a step in a crude machine — we have begun to do that; then in time we shall sail the air in great ships, and in some remote day man will pass through the air in his own body solely. No one who has keenly felt the joy and triumph of flight in his own person can fail to believe in this last prediction.