Scattered incidents and experiments, like those narrated above, are what make up the history of the beginnings of the national air force. In such a story no closely-knit dramatic sequence is possible. The history of the growth of an oak tree from an acorn may perhaps be told in dramatic form, but who can tell the history of the obscure workings of yeast, or of the growth of a field of grass? The earliest aviators were self-willed and diverse. As Captain Bertram Dickson remarked, when he was questioned concerning their enrolment for the national service, 'One man is a rich man; another man is an artist, or he is an actor; another man is a mechanic. They are funny fellows. You will get a certain number if you pay them well, because they are out for making money; you will get others who will do it for sport, and others who will do it for the advertisement.' The problem for the Government and for those who advised the Government was how to make a united body out of these odds and ends; how to reduce these talented, excitable, artistic, highly individual elements to the discipline and purpose of a great service. Two admirable instructors were at hand--the army and the navy. The thing had to be done quickly, and most of those soldiers and sailors who realized the importance of the problem were agreed in thinking that the only right way was to get the army and the navy each of them to develop its air service. Some others, looking at the thing in a broader light, held that the air should have its own service. The laws and habits of the land, they argued, are not the laws and habits of the sea; surely the air differs from both of them as much as they differ from each other. But this opinion could not be acted on at short notice. A great service cannot be built up from the beginning in one year, or even in the lifetime of one generation of men. Time is needed; and time was what was lacking. The only resource for immediate purposes was to engage the sympathies of the army and the navy, who are always willing to co-operate, though never to coalesce, and let each of them build, up its own air service after its own fashion. A certain formal unity, which might by degrees become a real unity, could be given to the two air services by the magic of a uniform and a name.