Oddly Enough (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Excerpt from Oddly Enough

Pegasus and Daedalus laid a heavy load on a moderately contented humanity when they first showed us the road through the heavens, and in an age which acclaims the scientist as he destroys romance, and the aviator as he annihilates time and space, we must accept, with the best grace we can, however sadly, the fact that we live in the era of so-called Progress and Advancement. Nothing, no corner of the earth, is sacred now and even the unsophisticated Polynesian must honeymoon in a cave lest some empty soda-water bottle jettisoned from a flying machine smite him untowardly in the back. Yet one is tempted to forgive man's efforts to conquer the air, if only for having given birth to the deathless statement of the persevering Italian who, long before the ice-cream era, having found his way to Scotland and persuaded James the Fourth, of blessed memory, to allow him to give an exhibition of flying with a pair of wings of his own making, took off from the topmost wall of Stirling Castle before that enterprising monarch and his assembled Court, and arrived with exceeding suddenness at the foot thereof, "the quhilke he hitt so hardily," as a contemporary chronicler states. Miraculously escaping death, he solemnly assured James that the sole reason for his failure was that he had basely trimmed his wings with feathers of a less noble fowl, instead of having used eagles' pinions!

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.