Wonderful Balloon Ascents; Or, The Conquest of the Skies

remarkable, they both preserved a brown or red tinge which astonished those that had seen them before they made the ascent. This distension of the blood-vessels would necessarily produce an inconvenience and a difficulty in the muscular action.” Chapter II. Ascent of M. Gay-Lussac Alone--Excursions of MM. Barral and Bixio. Respecting this ascent, Arago states that M. Gay-Lussac has reduced to their proper value the narratives of the physical pains which aeronauts say they suffer in lofty aerial ascents. M. Gay-Lussac says:--“Having arrived at the most elevated point of my ascent, 21,000 feet above sea level, my respiration was rendered sensibly difficult, but I was far from experiencing any illness of a kind to make me descend. My pulse and my breathing were very quick; breathing very frequently in an extremely dry atmosphere, I should not have been surprised if my throat had been so dry as to make it painful to swallow bread.” After having finished his observations, which referred chiefly to the magnetic needle, with all the tranquillity of a doctor in his study, Gay-Lussac descended to the earth between Rouen and Dieppe, eighty leagues from Paris. After the names of Robertson, Gay-Lussac, and Biot, science has registered those of Barral and Bixio, two men whose aeronautic achievements have enriched meteorology with more important discoveries, perhaps, than any we have yet mentioned. These gentlemen had conceived the project of rising by means of a balloon to a great height, in order to study, with the assistance of the very best instruments in use in their day, a multitude of phenomena then imperfectly known. The subjects to which they were specially to direct their attention, were the law of the decrease of temperature in progress upwards, the discovery of whether the chemical composition of the atmosphere is the same throughout all its parts, the comparison of the strength of the solar rays in the higher regions of the atmosphere and on the surface of the earth, the ascertaining whether the light reflected and transmitted by the clouds is or is