'Now that these particular experiments are leaving my exclusively private control I will say no more of them than what has been already published in the French press. The test will probably consist of an attempt to enter one of the French frontier towns, such as Belfort or Nancy, on the same day that the airship leaves Paris. It will not, of course, be necessary to make the whole journey in the airship. A military railway wagon may be assigned to carry it, with its balloon uninflated, with tubes of hydrogen to fill it, and with all the necessary machinery and instruments arranged beside it. At some station a short distance from the town to be entered the wagon may be uncoupled from the train, and a sufficient number of soldiers accompanying the officers will unload the airship and its appliances, transport the whole to the nearest open space, and at once begin inflating the balloon. Within two hours from quitting the train the airship may be ready for its flight to the interior of the technically-besieged town. 'Such may be the outline of the task--a task presented imperiously to French balloonists by the events of 1870-1, and which all the devotion and science of the Tissandier brothers failed to accomplish. To-day the problem may be set with better hope of success. All the essential difficulties may be revived by the marking out of a hostile zone around the town that must be entered; from beyond the outer edge of this zone, then, the airship will rise and take its flight--across it. 'Will the airship be able to rise out of rifle range? I have always been the first to insist that the normal place of the airship is in low altitudes, and I shall have written this book to little purpose if I have not shown the reader the real dangers attending any brusque vertical mounting to considerable heights. For this we have the terrible Severo accident before our eyes. In particular, I have expressed astonishment at hearing of experimenters rising to these altitudes without adequate purpose in their early stages of experience with dirigible balloons. All this is very different, however, from a reasoned, cautious mounting, whose necessity has been foreseen and prepared for.' Probably owing to the fact that his engines were not of sufficient power, Santos-Dumont cannot be said to have solved the problem of the military airship, although the French Government bought one of his vessels. At the same time, he accomplished much in furthering and inciting experiment with dirigible airships, and he will always rank high among the pioneers of aerostation. His experiments might have gone further had not the Wright brothers' success in America and French interest in the problem of the heavier-than-air machine turned him from the study of dirigibles to that of the aeroplane, in which also he takes high rank among the pioneers, leaving the construction of a successful military dirigible to such men as the Lebaudy brothers, Major Parseval, and Zeppelin.