If any one watches an insect, a bat, or a bird when dressing its wings, he will observe that it can incline the under surface of the wing at a great variety of angles to the horizon. This it does by causing the posterior or thin margin of the wing to rotate around the anterior or thick margin as an axis. As a result of this movement, the two margins are forced into double and opposite curves, and the wing converted into _a plastic helix_ or _screw_. He will further observe that the bat and bird, and some insects, have, in addition, the power of folding and drawing the wing towards the body during the up stroke, and of pushing it away from the body and extending it during the down stroke, so as alternately to diminish and increase its area; arrangements necessary to decrease the amount of resistance experienced by the wing during its ascent, and increase it during its descent. It is scarcely requisite to add, that in the aëroplanes and aërial screws, as at present constructed, no provision whatever is made for suddenly increasing or diminishing the flying surface, of conferring elasticity upon it, or of giving to it that infinite variety of angles which would enable it to seize and disentangle itself from the air with the necessary rapidity. Many investigators are of opinion that flight is a mere question of levity and power, and that if a machine could only be made light enough and powerful enough, it must of necessity fly, whatever the nature of its flying surfaces. A grave fallacy lurks here. Birds are not more powerful than quadrupeds of equal size, and Stringfellow’s machine, which, as we have seen, only weighed 12 lbs., exerted _one-third of a horse power_. The probabilities therefore are, that flight is dependent to a great extent on the nature of the flying surfaces, and the mode of applying those surfaces to the air.
_Artificial Wings_ (Borelli’s Views).--With regard to the production of _flight by the flapping of wings_, much may and has been said. Of all the methods yet proposed, it is unquestionably by far the most ancient. Discrediting as apocryphal the famous story of Dædalus and his waxen wings, we certainly have a very graphic account of artificial wings in the De Motu Animalium of Borelli, published as far back as 1680, _i.e._ nearly two centuries ago.[107]