While Charles Green was making his famous ascents in England, an equally celebrated aeronaut, John Wise, was pursuing the same art in America. During a long and successful career, unhappily terminated by an accident, Wise made many experiments in the construction of balloons, their shape, size, varnish, material, and so forth. His results, which he carefully put together, have been of the greatest value to balloon manufacturers until the present time. In the course of his many voyages he met with various exciting adventures. On one occasion while aloft he saw before him a huge black cloud of particularly forbidding aspect. Entering this, he found himself in the heart of a terrific storm. His balloon was caught in a whirlwind, and set so violently spinning and swinging that he was sea-sick with the motion, while, at the same time, he felt himself half-suffocated and scarce able to breathe. Within the cloud the cold was intense; the ropes of the balloon became glazed with ice and snow till they resembled glass rods; hail fell around, and the gloom was so great that from the car the silk above became invisible. “A noise resembling the rushing of a thousand mill-dams, intermingled with a dismal moaning sound of wind, surrounded me in this terrible flight.” Wise adds, “Bright sunshine was just above the clouds;” but though he endeavoured to reach it by throwing out ballast, the balloon had no sooner begun to rise upwards than it was caught afresh by the storm and whirled down again. Neither was he able, by letting out gas, to escape this furious vortex from beneath; and for twenty minutes he was swept to and fro, and up and down in the cloud, before he could get clear of it, or regain any control over his balloon. On another occasion Wise made an exceedingly daring and bold experiment. Convinced of the power which, as has before been said, an empty balloon has of turning itself into a natural parachute, he determined to put the matter to the test, and deliberately to burst his balloon when at a great height. For this purpose he made a special balloon of very thin material, and fastened up the neck so that there was no vent for the gas. He then ascended fearlessly to a height of 13,000 feet, where, through the expansion of the hydrogen with which it was filled, his balloon exploded. The gas escaped instantly, so that in ten seconds not a trace remained. The empty balloon at first descended with fearful rapidity, with a strange moaning sound as the air rushed through the network. Then the silk assuming parachute shape, the fall became less rapid, and finally the car, coming down in zigzags, turned upside down when close to the ground, and tossed Wise out into a field unhurt.