It may have been on account of the reluctance of this same or another driver that Le Bris chose a different method of launching himself in making a second experiment with his albatross. He chose the edge of a quarry which had been excavated in a depression of the ground; here he assembled his apparatus at the bottom of the quarry, and by means of a rope was hoisted to a height of nearly 100 ft. from the quarry bottom, this rope being attached to a mast which he had erected upon the edge of the depression in which the quarry was situated. Thus hoisted, the albatross was swung to face a strong breeze that blew inland, and Le Bris manipulated his levers to give the front edges of his wings a downward angle, so that only the top surfaces should take the wing pressure. Having got his balance, he obtained a lifting angle of incidence on the wings by means of his levers, and released the hook that secured the machine, gliding off over the quarry. On the glide he met with the inevitable upward current of air that the quarry and the depression in which it was situated caused; this current upset the balance of the machine and flung it to the bottom of the quarry, breaking it to fragments. Le Bris, apparently as intrepid as ingenious, gripped the mast from which his levers were worked, and, springing upward as the machine touched earth, escaped with no more damage than a broken leg. But for the rebound of the levers he would have escaped even this. The interest of these experiments is enhanced by the fact that Le Bris was a seafaring man who conducted them from love of the science which had fired his imagination, and in so doing exhausted his own small means. It was in 1855 that he made these initial attempts, and twelve years passed before his persistence was rewarded by a public subscription made at Brest for the purpose of enabling him to continue his experiments. He built a second albatross, and on the advice of his friends ballasted it for flight instead of travelling in it himself. It was not so successful as the first, probably owing to the lack of human control while in flight; on one of the trials a height of 150 ft. was attained, the glider being secured by a thin rope and held so as to face into the wind. A glide of nearly an eighth of a mile was made with the rope hanging slack, and, at the end of this distance, a rise in the ground modified the force of the wind, whereupon the machine settled down without damage. A further trial in a gusty wind resulted in the complete destruction of this second machine; Le Bris had no more funds, no further subscriptions were likely to materialise, and so the experiments of this first exponent of the art of gliding (save for Besnier and his kind) came to an end. They constituted a notable achievement, and undoubtedly Le Bris deserves a better place than has been accorded him in the ranks of the early experimenters.