“Sir.” said the president, who in vain endeavored to keep himself cool, “you forget what was said by our immortal Franklin at the first appearance of the fire balloon, ‘It is but a child, but it will grow!’ It was but a child, and it has grown.” “No, Mr. President, it has not grown! It has got fatter—and this is not the same thing!” This was a direct attack on the Weldon Institute, which had decreed, helped, and paid for the making of a monster balloon. And so propositions of the following kind began to fly about the room: “Turn him out!” “Throw him off the platform!” “Prove that he is heavier than the air!” But these were only words, not means to an end. Robur remained impassible, and continued: “There is no progress for your aerostats, my citizen balloonists; progress is for flying machines. The bird flies, and he is not a balloon, he is a piece of mechanism!” “Yes, he flies!” exclaimed the fiery Bat T. Fynn; “but he flies against all the laws of mechanics.” “Indeed!” said Robur, shrugging his shoulders, and resuming, “Since we have begun the study of the flight of large and small birds one simple idea has prevailed—to imitate nature, which never makes mistakes. Between the albatross, which gives hardly ten beats of the wing per minute, between the pelican, which gives seventy—” “Seventy-one.” said the voice of a scoffer. “And the bee, which gives one hundred and ninety-two per second—” “One hundred and ninety-three!” said the facetious individual. “And, the common house fly, which gives three hundred and thirty—” “And a half!” “And the mosquito, which gives millions—” “No, milliards!” But Robur, the interrupted, interrupted not his demonstration. “Between these different rates—” he continued. “There is a difference.” said a voice. “There is a possibility of finding a practical solution. When De Lucy showed that the stag beetle, an insect weighing only two grammes, could lift a weight of four hundred grammes, or two hundred times its own weight, the problem of aviation was solved. Besides, it has been shown that the wing surface decreases in proportion to the increase of the size and weight of the animal. Hence we can look forward to such contrivances—” “Which would never fly!” said secretary Phil Evans. “Which have flown, and which will fly.” said Robur, without being in the least disconcerted, “and which we can call streophores, helicopters, orthopters—or, in imitation of the word ‘nef,’ which comes from ‘navis,’ call them from ‘avis,’ ‘efs,’—by means of which man will become the master of space. The helix—” “Ah, the helix!” replied Phil Evans. “But the bird has no helix; that we know!” “So.” said Robur; “but Penaud has shown that in reality the bird makes a helix, and its flight is helicopteral. And the motor of the future is the screw—” “From such a maladee Saint Helix keep us free!” sung out one of the members, who had accidentally hit upon the air from Herold’s “Zampa.”