In August, 1852, {9a} a French aeronaut named Bouthellier ascended on a trapeze attached to the car of a balloon, and when the balloon was at a respectable height began to twist himself round ‘almost in a knot,’ then to untie himself, and finally to suspend his body as he hung, first by his neck, then by his heels. The reporter tells us that this was done ‘to the evident mingled alarm and pleasure of the spectators,’ and the whole thing was considered to ‘redound greatly to the credit’ of Mr. Simpson. [Picture: The Dancing-Platform, Cremorne, 1847. From the Pictorial Times, June, 1847] In September of the same year (1852), Madame Poitevin, ‘in the character of Europa,’ ascended from Cremorne on the back of a heifer which was attached to her balloon. This was nothing new to _her_ or to the sight-seers of Paris, where she and her husband had made hundreds of ascents on the backs of horses, and even ‘a great many ascents with a bull.’ A pony ascent had been made by Green at Vauxhall in 1850, {9b} but the English magistrates drew the line at a heifer, and Simpson and his Europa were fined at the Ilford Sessions on September 7, 1852, for cruelty to animals. This wretched exhibition was not, of course, repeated, but risky parachute feats were by no means to be abandoned. On June 27, 1854, at about seven o’clock, Henri Latour, a balloonist of the age of fifty, went up lashed to a parachute which was formed like a horse, and suspended from W. H. Adams’s balloon. As the balloon was rising an attempt was made (by means of a trigger-iron) to release the parachute, but it somehow got twisted, and its two guiding ‘wings’ did not expand. The descent of the balloon continued, and in the Tottenham marshes, which it had now rapidly reached, struck the earth, and the unhappy Latour was dragged over the ground and through the trees, and died a few days after of his injuries. {10a}