Wild and daring as was the act, it is no less true that men's first attempts at a flight through the air were literally with wings. They conjectured that by elongating their arms with a broad mechanical covering, they could convert them into wings; and forgetting that birds possess air-cells, which they can inflate, that their bones are full of air instead of marrow, and, also, that they possess enormous strength of sinews expressly for this purpose, these desperate half-theorists have launched themselves from towers and other high places, and floundered down to the demolition of their necks, or limbs, according to the obvious laws and penalties of nature. We do not allude to the Icarus of old, or any fabulous or remote aspirants, but to modern times. Wonderful as it may seem, there are some instances in which they escaped with only a few broken bones. Milton tells a story of this kind in his "History of Britain;" the flying man being a monk of Malmsbury, "in his youth." He lived to be impudent and jocose on the subject, and attributed his failure entirely to his having forgotten to wear a broad tail of feathers. In 1742 the Marquis de Bacqueville announced that he would fly with wings from the top of his own house on the _Quai des Theatins_ to the garden of the _Tuileries_. He actually accomplished half the distance, when, being exhausted with his efforts, the wings no longer beat the air, and he came down into the Seine, and would have escaped unhurt, but that he fell against one of the floating machines of the Parisian laundresses, and thereby fractured his leg. But the most successful of all these instances of the extraordinary, however misapplied, force of human energies and daring, was that of a certain citizen of Bologna, in the thirteenth century, who actually managed, with some kind of wing contrivance, to fly from the mountain of Bologna to the River Reno, without injury. "Wonderful! admirable!" cried all the citizens of Bologna. "Stop a little!" said the officers of the Holy Inquisition; "this must be looked into." They sat in sacred conclave. If the man had been killed, said they, or even mutilated shockingly, our religious scruples would have been satisfied; but, as he has escaped unhurt, it is clear that he must be in league with the devil. The poor "successful" man was therefore condemned to be burnt alive; and the sentence of the Holy Catholic Church was carried into Christian execution.