Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, August, 1880

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J.B. Lippincott & Co. , in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Transcriber's note: Variant spellings and unusual punctuation have been retained. A Table of Contents has been created for the HTML version. Obscured text entries are shown with a mouse-hover pop-up like this. CONTENTS AMERICAN AËRONAUTS. ADAM AND EVE. POSSESSION. AN OLD ENGLISH HOME: BRAMSHILL HOUSE. CANOEING ON THE HIGH MISSISSIPPI. NATIONAL MUSIC AN INTERPRETER OF NATIONAL CHARACTER. MALLSTON'S YOUNGEST. THE EARLY DAYS OF MORMONISM. A VENGEANCE. STUDIES IN THE SLUMS. WESTBROOK. WHERE LIGHTNING STRIKES. THE SEA'S SECRET. DUNGENESS, GENERAL GREENE'S SEA-ISLAND PLANTATION. OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP. LITERATURE OF THE DAY. Books Received. AMERICAN AËRONAUTS. BALLOON ENTANGLED IN A TREE. S cattered here and there in this matter-of-fact, utilitarian age of Business one finds instances of that love of daring for its own sake, with an insatiable longing for new scenes and novel sensations, which in the days of chivalry moved the mass of men to put saddle to horse and ride off Somewhere seeking Something—just as occasional trilobites, lonely and misshapen, are found in ages subsequent to the Silurian. Of such stuff are our Arctic and African explorers made; the men who run the lightning-expresses have a touch of it; it crops out in steeple-climbers, cave-explorers, beast-tamers; it makes men assault cloud-piercing and ice-mantled mountain-peaks and launch their frail canoes for voyages down earth-riving cañons and across continent sundering oceans. Sometimes action is denied, and then it strikes in and makes poets—perhaps the most daring adventurers of all. It must be difficult for the beaters of iron and the barterers in swine to understand why such useless timber is allowed to cumber the great workhouse; but then we don't know exactly what the trilobites were good for, and the utilitarians may find comfort in the reflection that at the present rate the obnoxious family is likely to entirely disappear with the Palæozoic. Aëronauts have been free and accepted members of this order of modern knights-errant, from hot-headed, ill-fated Pilâtre de Rozier down to Gaston Tissandier, the man who still edits La Nature in the lower strata of an ocean into the treacherous upper depths of which he has risen seven miles. Your true aëronaut is not an inventor of flying-machines, not much concerned about what is known as the "problem