Kites are supposed to have been invented four hundred years before the Christian era by Archytas, and at Smyrna the flying of kites remains a national sport to this day. We are told that two hundred years later, a Chinese general, Han Sin, employed kites as a means of communication with the garrison of a besieged town, and there is a legend about their use in Japan to dislodge and carry away a golden ornament from a tower. Whatever may be the truth of these stories, we know that kite-flying in the Malay Archipelago, in China, and in Japan, has been a pastime for all classes during centuries, and that the Asiatic people have always been the expert kite-fliers of the world. Kites with tails seem to have been introduced into England about two hundred and fifty years ago, and Isaac Newton when a school-boy made some improvements in them. Notwithstanding the fact that generations of boys have flown kites and so eminent a mathematician as Euler investigated their theory, until recently kites remained toys unsuited for practical purposes. Since the tailless kite has become a familiar object, it has been said facetiously that kites lost their tails by the same process of evolution which deprived man of his caudal appendage; but as kites without tails have been flown in Asia for centuries, the truth is that the tailed kites were the ones first brought to Europe as playthings. To-day in Holland we see boys flying the English bow-kite and the common kite with crossed sticks, both of which require tails, and by the side of them tailless kites imported from the Dutch colonies in Java. Fig. 7 represents a kite from the east coast of Java, drawn from a model in a museum at Amsterdam, and also a drawing of a Chinese bird-kite in the National Museum at Washington. Like most of the oriental kites, they are made flat, but when exposed to the wind the extremities of the wings, which have a frame of split bamboo, bend backward, securing in this way the stability which in our common flat kite is gained by the action of the tail in lowering the centre of gravity and in maintaining the inclination to the wind. [Illustration: FIG. 7.--Oriental tailless Kites.]