We are furnished with many interesting proofs of this. Old Chinese, Arabian and Hindu fables give some beautiful descriptions of ærial chariots, in which wizards, princes and fairies sped over the fertile and populous plains of their native country, disbursing good or evil, according to their disposition, to the poor devils crawling in the dust beneath them. The Jews had their cherubim. The Assyrians have left us their winged bulls; the Greeks, their Sphinxes; while the Roman writers describe how that mythical personage, Daedalus, a famous Athenian artificer, and builder of the Cretan labyrinth, constructed wings with which he flew across the Ægian Sea, to escape the resentment of Minos. But his son, Icarus, undoubtedly of his strength giving out, fell into the water and was drowned. Their nation has bequeathed to us various bas-reliefs, illustrative of what appear well-proportioned wings. Archytos, the great geometrician, made a wooden dove that flew like a natural one, and the famous German astronomer, John Mueller, who died suddenly in Rome, at the age of forty, in 1476, and whose memory was celebrated last month in Germany, constructed an artificial eagle, which flew out to greet the Emperor, Charles V, when he visited Nuremberg. This Mueller was more widely known by the assumed name of "Regiomontanus,"--the "Kingshiller"--that is, "one from Koenigsberg," a small village in the heart of Germany; the custom of the times being for learned men to adopt the latin name of their birthplace. He invented the almanac, and prepared the first astronomical tables, by the aid of which mariners, who, up to that late day could only make coasting voyages, were enabled to trust themselves to the open sea, with some degree of assurance; and Columbus was among the earliest to use these tables, twenty years afterwards, on his first discovery voyage to America. * * * * * Another German, a young watchmaker's apprentice, constructed a flying machine, with which he, when showing the same to his ignorant townspeople, flew away to escape mobbing. His bones and pieces of the machine were found some years afterward in a wild and isolated part of the Black Forest. Towards the end of the fifteenth century Giovanni Battista Dantes, of Perugia, flew several times over the Thrasimenian Sea; he certainly must have been at a considerable elevation, for he fell on a church steeple and broke a leg. Another account, particularly noticed in history, is that of a man who flew high in the air in the City of Rome, under the reign of Nero, but lost his life in the descent.