With regard to safety as a steady, every-day means of transportation, all of us, in and out of the profession, know that, as Mr. Hudson Maxim has said, to make the aeroplane a common vehicle for, say, the commuter, "It must be improved so that flights shall become more a function of the machine and less a function of the aviator." At present a great deal depends upon the man who is flying especially upon his quick and accurate judgment and his power to execute his judgment instantly and automatically. The man who buys an aeroplane to fly knows this beforehand and takes it into account; indeed it is a question whether, if the flying machine were as safe as a rocking-chair, there would be so much fascination about it; but while the aviator will always have to take into account, no matter how the mechanism may be improved, a certain element of danger that must attend it, he may as well remember, to quote Mr. Maxim once more, that "the tenure of life of no automobilist is stronger than his steering gear." It certainly is not looking too far ahead to forecast the entrance of the aeroplane into the commuter's life. The great mass of the people certainly will not take the air-line, any more than they are now coming in by automobile every morning, and yet how many business men–and not necessarily the richest–do make the trip, that twice a day they used to take in a railroad car, in the open air, with the exhilarating breezes of their own automobiles? Perhaps not these same business men, but a corresponding class, will undoubtedly reduce the dull hours of train travel by half and turn them into hours of delight by the popularisation of aeroplane transportation. As has been the case with every means of transportation that has shortened time of travel, the habitable zones around cities will grow larger and larger as places hitherto inaccessible open before the coming of the swiftest form of transportation known to man, and the only one not dependent upon the earth's surface, whether mountain, swamp, or river, to shape its course. If we had a course only a few hundred feet wide from New York to St. Louis or Chicago, aeroplanes could go through every day and there would be little danger; indeed, even as things are now, it would be a much safer method of travel than by automobile, as well as of course much faster. Long lanes with grass on each side and an automobile highway in the middle would be of the greatest advantage to both forms of travel. In crossing mountains on the downhill side an aeroplane could glide for long distances at an angle of one to five, so that if the elevation were a mile high it could glide five miles before landing. And on the up-hill side it could of course land immediately and with ease.