ASCENT  OF MONT BLANC.
 

TRAVELS IN THE AIR.
 

IINTEODUCTION,

I HAVE elsewhere expressed my opinion that the Balloon should be
received only as the first principle of some aerial instrument which
remains to be suggested. In its present form it is useless for
commercial enterprise, and so little adapts itself to our necessities
that it might drop into oblivion to-morrow, and we should miss
nothing from the conveniences of life. But we can afford to wait,
for already it has done for us that which no other power ever accom¬
plished ; it has gratified the desire natural to us all to view the earth
in a new aspect, and to sustain ourselves in an element hitherto the
exclusive domain of birds and insects. We have been enabled to
ascend among the phenomena of the heavens, and to exchange con¬
jecture for instrumental facts, recorded at elevations exceeding the
highest mountains of the earth.

Doubtless among the earliest aeronauts a disposition arose to
estimate unduly the departure gained from our natural endowments,
and to forget that the new faculty we had assumed, while opening
the boundless regions of the atmosphere as fresh territory to explore,
was subject to limitations a century of progress might do little to
extend.    In the time of Lunardi, a lady writing to a friend about a