Practically contemporary with Cayley was Thomas Walker, concerning whom little is known save that he was a portrait painter of Hull, where was published his pamphlet on _The Art of Flying_ in 1810, a second and amplified edition being produced, also in Hull, in 1831. The pamphlet, which has been reproduced _in extenso_ in the _Aeronautical Classics_ series published by the Royal Aeronautical Society, displays a curious mixture of the true scientific spirit and colossal conceit. Walker appears to have been a man inclined to jump to conclusions, which carried him up to the edge of discovery and left him vacillating there. The study of the two editions of his pamphlet side by side shows that their author made considerable advances in the practicability of his designs in the 21 intervening years, though the drawings which accompany the text in both editions fail to show anything really capable of flight. The great point about Walker’s work as a whole is its suggestiveness; he did not hesitate to state that the ‘art’ of flying is as truly mechanical as that of rowing a boat, and he had some conception of the necessary mechanism, together with an absolute conviction that he knew all there was to be known. ‘Encouraged by the public,’ he says, ‘I would not abandon my purpose of making still further exertions to advance and complete an art, the discovery of the _true principles_ (the italics are Walker’s own) of which, I trust, I can with certainty affirm to be my own.’ The pamphlet begins with Walker’s admiration of the mechanism of flight as displayed by birds. ‘It is now almost twenty years,’ he says, ‘since I was first led to think, by the study of birds and their means of flying, that if an artificial machine were formed with wings in exact imitation of the mechanism of one of those beautiful living machines, and applied in the very same way upon the air, there could be no doubt of its being made to fly, for it is an axiom in philosophy that the same cause will ever produce the same effect.’ With this he confesses his inability to produce the said effect through lack of funds, though he clothes this delicately in the phrase ‘professional avocations and other circumstances.’ Owing to this inability he published his designs that others might take advantage of them, prefacing his own researches with a list of the very early pioneers, and giving special mention to Friar Bacon, Bishop Wilkins, and the Portuguese friar, De Guzman. But, although he seems to suggest that others should avail themselves of his theoretical knowledge, there is a curious incompleteness about the designs accompanying his work, and about the work itself, which seems to suggest that he had more knowledge to impart than he chose to make public--or else that he came very near to complete solution of the problem of flight, and stayed on the threshold without knowing it.