Among American aeronauts none possessed a larger fund of such thrilling incident or greater enthusiasm for his calling than he who recently paid that last penalty which ever hovers over its followers--the venerable John Wise. His autobiography, _Through the Air_, is a prose poem on the glories of Cloudland. The following extract from a private letter written by him in 1876, after an aeronautical career of forty years, comprising nearly five hundred ascensions, illustrates this enthusiasm and his views on the sanitary aspect of aeronautics: "I claim that the balloon is the best sanitarium within the grasp of enervated humanity. I can demonstrate its utility, by theory and by fact, for all chronic diseases and for the improvement of the mental and physical functions. Elevate a person ten or twelve thousand feet above the sea-level and his whole texture expands: a wrinkled, cadaverous person fills out as plump as a youth. Then the beauty and magnitude of the scenery within the scope of vision exalt the mental faculties, soul and body become exhilarated, the appetite is quickened and all the symptoms of convalescence ensue. Why, my dear friend, I am bound to ascribe my health and vigor at the age of over sixty-eight to my profession, and only for that do I persist in it. When I make up my mind to rust and die I will give up balloon-ascensions." Since Mr. Wise was not of a nature to be easily reconciled to "rust and die," can we doubt that the great transit could have come to him at no kinder season than when it should seem but a brief pausing on his upward flight? Though it will never be known just how or when he met the end, we may be certain that he had walked hand in hand with Death too long to greatly dread the final embrace. May we not think of him now as feasting his spirit on the splendid visions of that Promised Land which, Moses-like, it was permitted him to see prefigured in its earthly type? Throughout his adventures, too generally known to require more than passing allusion, one sees the same passionate devotion to the grand and sublime in sight and sensation, the same calm disregard of danger, whether exploding his balloon at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet and coolly noting the "fearful moaning noise caused by the air rushing through the network and the gas escaping above," preparing to test a lifelong theory of a steady easterly current by attempting to make it the medium of crossing the Atlantic, or participating with La Mountain and others in a voyage which, begun at St. Louis at 6.30 P.M., July 1, 1859, met daybreak at Fort Wayne, extended over the length of Lake Erie, included a view of Niagara from the altitude of a mile, and finally, after skirmishing within thirty feet of the storm-tossed waves of Lake Ontario for fifty miles and ploughing a tornado-track through a dense forest, terminated in a treetop near Sackett's Harbor, Jefferson county, New York, at 2.20 P.M.--twelve hundred miles in nineteen hours and forty