Nor was this all. There was yet another triumph of the aeronautical art which, within the same brief period, had been to all intents and purposes achieved, even if it had not been brought to the same state of perfection as at the present hour. This was the Parachute. This fact is one which for a sufficient reason is not generally known. It is very commonly supposed that the parachute, in anything like its present form, is a very modern device, and that the art of successfully using it had not been introduced to the world even so lately as thirty years ago. Thus, we find it stated in works of that date dealing with the subject that disastrous consequences almost necessarily attended the use of the parachute, "the defects of which had been attempted to be remedied in various ways, but up to this time without success." A more correct statement, however, would have been that the art of constructing and using a practicable parachute had through many years been lost or forgotten. In actual fact, it had been adopted with every assurance of complete success by the year 1785, when Blanchard by its means lowered dogs and other animals with safety from a balloon. A few years later he descended himself in a like apparatus from Basle, meeting, however, with the misadventure of a broken leg. But we must go much further back for the actual conception of the parachute, which, we might suppose, may originally have been suggested by the easy floating motion with which certain seeds or leaves will descend from lofty trees, or by the mode adopted by birds of dropping softly to earth with out-stretched wings. M. de la Loubere, in his historical account of Siam, which he visited in 1687-88, speaks of an ingenious athlete who exceedingly diverted the King and his court by leaping from a height and supporting himself in the air by two umbrellas, the handles of which were affixed to his girdle. In 1783, that is, the same year as that in which the balloon was invented, M. le Normand experimented with a like umbrella-shaped contrivance, with a view to its adoption as a fire escape, and he demonstrated the soundness of the principle by descending himself from the windows of a lofty house at Lyons.