All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.

In 1860 a total eclipse of the sun was visible in British America.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

The result was that, if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening, I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme.

So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.

A few years later the Naval Academy was founded at Annapolis, and a similar course was pursued to provide it with a corps of instructors.

Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.