Viewing page 22 of 63

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

8

generally the most marvelous stories of [[strikethrough]] hair-breadth escapes to relate [[/strikethrough]] blood oozing from their finger ends, and the balloon turning topsy turvy, and the miraculous escapes they have made, to relate.

  I trust enough has been said and done, to show that we can go up into the air - into the cloud - into the storm, by day or by night - to investigate the phenomena of the upper air, without incurring the accusation of being reckless, especially, when high officials of a state use them to escape from a beleaugered city, and governments send them off with mail-route agents to distribute daily mails.

  The Franklin Institute - a time honored school of Art and science is worthy of the establishment of a section of Meteorology for the purpose of exploring the wonders of the atmosphere with the aid of a balloon and meteorological instruments. An air-ship can be constructed for such purpose at a trifling cost as compared to the advantages to be derived, and the cost of inflation is now vastly reduced in the facilities afforded by the coal-gas, and with such men as Doctor Wahl, our efficient Secretary to make the investigations, and an experienced air-navigator to take charge of the air-ship, and if my experience is worth any thing, it would be voluntarily given, much can be done towards the establishment of certain scientific data as related to meteorological phenomena, in the course of a year.

Doctor Wahl allows me to say that he has, not only no hesitation in making such explorations, but that he would most earnestly and cheerfully engage in the pursuit. The barometer-hygrometer, and electrometer, in the corner of the house, may hang there a century and not reveal as much to the explanation of Meteorological science, as they will in one day up in the clouds, in the hands of a well trained person.

  We owe such a course of investigation to the age we live in. The onward march of knowledge exacts it, and demands it at the hands of the learned Institutions, and there is none so well adapted to its prosecution as the Franklin