French aviation derives directly from Lilienthal and collaterally from the Wrights. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; but the martyrs, for the most part, die in faith, without assurance of the harvest that is to come. When Lilienthal was killed he can hardly have known that his example and his careful records would so soon bear fruit in other countries. He was regarded by his fellow-countrymen as a whimsical acrobat, who took mad risks and paid the price. But as soon as he was dead, the story of what he had done got abroad, and began to raise up for him disciples and successors, who carried on his experiments. The chief of these in France was Captain F. Ferber, an officer of artillery and a student of science, who from 1896 onwards was a teacher in the military school at Fontainebleau. It was in 1898 that he first came across an account of Lilienthal; the reading of it impressed him as deeply as it impressed the Wrights. Here was a man, he thought, who had discovered the right way of learning to fly; if only the way were followed, success was sure. Like the Wrights, Ferber lays stress chiefly on practice. It was he, not Lilienthal, who was the author of the saying, 'To design a flying machine is nothing; to build one is nothing much; to try it in the air is everything'. In the book on aviation which he wrote shortly before his death in 1909 he expounds his creed and narrates his experiences. His mathematical knowledge, he says, served him well, for it saved him from being condemned as an empiric by those dogmatic men of science, very numerous in France (and, he might have added, in the universities of all countries), who believe that science points the way to practice, whereas the most that science can do, says Ferber, is to follow in the wake of practice, and interpret it. So he set himself to work on a plan as old as the world--first to create the facts, and then to expound them in speech and writing.