So much inventive ingenuity, so much marvellous energy has been expended upon the solution of the problem of transporting large masses, in which we see the wheel has finally played an important part, that the question of the individual transportation of individual men has received comparatively little attention, and it is only within the last twenty-five years that an amount of labor and thought has been given to this problem at all commensurate with its importance. This recent labor and thought has not been expended in vain; it has placed the man, too, upon the wheel, which has done so much towards developing the use of other energy, and at last there spreads out before him a beautiful vista of independent locomotion unexampled in all the previous experience of his race. As wheel suggests the name “cycle,” let us call this art, appertaining to the man and the wheel, “The Cycle Art,” or, more definitely, if we wish, the art of “Man-Motor Carriages.” CHAPTER II. THE CYCLE ART. Posterity will always consider this the embryo generation of the cycling art; it might well be termed the “living wheel age.” A number of valuable books have been written on the fundamental principles of locomotion by means of walking, riding upon animate beings, flying and creeping, and also upon all kinds of inanimate or mechanical motors, but little has been said about physical properties underlying the intervention of a wheel between the body of man and the surface to be travelled over, the motor being man himself. The interesting art of man-motor carriages has already developed an industry of such great importance that the certainty as to its permanency is beyond cavil, and, believing that it will yet assume much greater proportions and become of more and more absorbing interest, there seems to be some excuse for an attempt to place even a limited amount of personal information before those connected with the industry and before the admirers of the art. There are few industries the product of which is dispersed among so varied a class of patrons, and scarcely none in which the patron takes so lively an interest in the respective articles produced. In most industries, where a machine is the product, the consumer is expected to be an expert in the art to which the industry appertains, and is therefore supposed to be capable of individual judgment as to the merits of what he acquires; if a steam-engine is the object of the purchase, it is expected that an expert of some ability in the art will judge of and afterwards run and repair it; but how could this be expected with a bicycle?