Another Frenchman alert to the glory of aërial motion was L. P. Mouillard, the poet-farmer of Algeria. From boyhood he studied the birds with unabated interest and pleasure. He would journey miles to attend the “morning prayer” of the starlings in the forest of Baba-Ali; noting, just before sunrise, how their melodies suddenly hushed, and the forest seemed to bound upward, and heaven filled with the music of innumerable wings. He would time the shadow of the high bird of passage riding the hurricane from continent to continent. He saw the tyrant eagle fold his wings in mid air and plunge a thousand feet in ferocious swoop after the swift-fleeing duck or rabbit. He loved to watch the great tawny vulture on the mountain top shake the dew from his vast plumes, straddle the morning wind, and all day long, with never a beat of those grand pinions, soar godlike through immensity, the marvel and delight of the nether world. When the electric wind of the desert, blowing from Central Africa, brought the big scavengers and noble birds of prey, he sat on the ground scrutinizing their majestic flight and planning to imitate it. He would lie in ambush where the silent-rowing owl darted at dusk through the timber, fierce and swift as the eagle; a dreadful thing, with its night piercing eyes, its big ears and beak, its horrid talons, its sudden shriek startling the forest with ominous echoes. No feature escaped him, and least of all an aërodynamic one. For thirty years he continued these studies. He would bring home the birds, lay them on their backs and mark their contour on paper, measure their projected area, weigh and compare them. He formulated curious conclusions about sailors and rowers, the functions of tail and quill feathers, weight and wing-spread, bulk, agglomeration of mass, resistance and velocity. He notes that only massive birds soar well, the broad-winged ones requiring a moderate wind, the narrow-winged ones requiring a gale, and sailing with perfect ease in a tempest; and he concludes that man may imitate both types. His book[24] is replete with charming anecdotes, observations and quaint theories, interesting alike to ornithology and aviation. But Mouillard did more than theorize; he built soaring machines and soared a little. His third and best glider, illustrated in Fig. 39, was a tailless monoplane made of curved agave sticks screwed to boards, and covered with muslin. The aviator, standing in the open space C, harnessed the plane on with straps looped round his legs and shoulders, and fastened to the points D D. His forearms, passing under straps, rested on the board, enabling him to tilt the whole by shifting his weight. In order to vary the dihedral angle between the wings, they were hinged together and actuated by rods running from the man’s feet to the ends of the boards, hardly as far out as the center of wind pressure, thus apparently stressing his legs like a wishbone. [Illustration: FIG. 39.—MOUILLARD’S AËROPLANE.]