Among these early students of the science were Leonardo da Vinci, who is best known to the world as a painter and sculptor, but who was a great engineer and architect of his time, and Jean Baptiste Dante, a brother of the great poet. Although Da Vinci was the more scientific in his experiments, Dante made greater progress, and it is on record that he made many wonderful flights with a glider of his own construction over Lake Trasimene. He launched his glider from a cliff into the teeth of the wind, showing thereby his knowledge of the fact that a glider works best when flown against a high wind, because in that way the air is passing under it at greater speed. In one flight he made about 800 feet, which would be a fine record for any glider manipulated by an expert to-day. Finally Dante attempted an exhibition at Perugia, at the marriage festival of a celebrated general, fell on the roof of the Notre Dame Church and broke one of his legs. Da Vinci had three different schemes for human flight. One was the old idea of bird flight, first dreamed of by the Greeks when Ovid wrote the poem of "Dædalus and Icarus." Scientists called the machine that Da Vinci proposed an orthopter and the operator was supposed by the movement of both arms and legs to fly by flapping the wings. Needless to say it did not work, and we know to-day that bird flight by wing flapping is probably impossible for man. Another of Da Vinci's ideas is still being worked upon by some inventors. This was a machine known as the helicopter, which was supposed to fly upward by the twisting of a great horizontal screw ninety-six feet in diameter. The idea was just the same as that of the toy that started the Wright brothers to thinking. The trouble with Da Vinci's machine was that he had no power to run it. Boys in playing with toy helicopters to-day can run them with rubber bands, but Da Vinci had to turn his screw by human power. Little was accomplished with this machine, although Da Vinci showed its practicability with models. The third scheme of this Italian scientist is one that many years later was perfected and demonstrated at every county fair--that is, the parachute. The first parachute was very crude, but it soon was developed to a fairly high stage of effectiveness and men came down from the tops of towers in them without much injury.