Although many persons had proposed from time to time to ascend by means of balloons filled with heated or rarified air, or with hydrogen gas, it was reserved for the brothers Montgolfier of Lyons to realize this bold and singular idea. These brothers had originally been destined to science, but on the death of an elder brother who had been an extensive paper maker at Lyons, they abandoned their former pursuits to continue the manufacture. They made large paper balloons, which, whether filled with hydrogen gas or heated air, ascended, and one brother ascended to a small height at Lyons. On introducing their invention to the notice of the public and the royal family at Paris, the greatest enthusiasm was excited, and personages of the highest rank accompanied the adventurous brothers in their aërial voyages. Pilatre de Roxier, then director of the king’s museum, devoted himself completely to the improvement of the new art of the navigation of the air; and after having ascended from Versailles frequently, and gained a considerably greater height than any of his predecessors, he resolved to cross the British Channel, and pass from France to England in a fire-balloon. He ascended from a village about half way between Calais and Boulogne, on September the 16th, 1784, with a gentleman of the town as a companion; and having attained a considerable height, was carried by the favourable wind over the sea in his proper course. The balloon however continuing to rise, got into a current of air in an opposite direction, and was brought again over the land; at this moment the spectators on shore were horrified to observe that the balloon, half lost in the clouds, was on fire, and after a moment the car was observed to fall. The remains of the car and of the unfortunate aëronauts, in whom scarcely a vestige of human form could be traced, were found in a field on the road to Abbeville; and a stone bearing the simple inscription of the fate of Pilatre de Roxier and his companion marks to the present day the place, close by the road-side, where the bodies were inhumed. The substitution of hydrogen or of coal gas for the fire-balloon, has deprived aërial navigation of its greatest dangers. No good means of steering or tacking a balloon having been discovered, the art has not yet fulfilled the expectations that were at first formed of it: the balloon is at the mercy of the winds; and although the voyagers travel in ease and safety, and often with rail-road speed, yet as it cannot be foretold in what direction the balloon must go, voyages in the air have been as yet only an exciting and not very dangerous amusement. K. * * * * *