. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian Institution. Archives; Discoveries in science. 194 EXTRACTS FROM A PAPER ON FLYING. My recent experiuieuts liave been uiade Iruiu liills liavini; an eleva- tion of about 250 feet and sloping uniformly every way at an angle of 10 to 15°. From the lower 1 have already sailed a distance of over 250 yards. The great difficulty to be encouutereil in the endeavor to soar comes in learning t) gaide the flight, rather than in the difficulty of providing i)o\A'er to move the wings. Progr
. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian Institution. Archives; Discoveries in science. 194 EXTRACTS FROM A PAPER ON FLYING. My recent experiuieuts liave been uiade Iruiu liills liavini; an eleva- tion of about 250 feet and sloping uniformly every way at an angle of 10 to 15°. From the lower 1 have already sailed a distance of over 250 yards. The great difficulty to be encouutereil in the endeavor to soar comes in learning t) gaide the flight, rather than in the difficulty of providing i)o\A'er to move the wings. Progress in the mechanics of flying received at one time a severe clieck through the utterances of a high authority in physics. Starting Avith an erroneous hypothesis and putting too high a Aalue on the amount of work reipiired, he claimed that the maximum of possible flight had already been devehjped in the largest birds, and, as man represented about f »ur times the heaviest of them, human flight was. to be discarded as an utter impossibility. Now, it nuist be admitted that the difficulties increase with the size of the flying individual; but flying itself is not the difficulty, for the largest flyers are at the same time the best flyers when they once get going in the air. The object of this paper is to attempt to disi)el old prejiulices and to win new adherents for the problem in question. Even considered only as a physical exercise, the sjiort of flying would create one of tlie health- iest of all enjoyments and add one of the most eflective remedies to the means now adopted for the conipiest of those diseases which are inci- dent to our modern culture. I f. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original Smithsonian Institution. Board of Regents; United States National Museum. Report of the U. S. National
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