That artificial flight is a possible thing is proved beyond doubt--_1st_, by the fact that flight is a natural movement; and _2d_, because the natural movements of walking and swimming have already been successfully imitated.
The very obvious bearing which natural movements have upon artificial ones, and the relation which exists between organic and inorganic movements, invest our subject with a peculiar interest.
It is the blending of natural and artificial progression in theory and practice which gives to the one and the other its chief charm. The history of artificial progression is essentially that of natural progression. The same laws regulate and determine both. The wheel of the locomotive and the screw of the steam-ship apparently greatly differ from the limb of the quadruped, the fin of the fish, and the wing of the bird; but, as I shall show in the sequel, the curves which go to form the wheel and the screw are found in the travelling surfaces of all animals, whether they be limbs (furnished with feet), or fins, or wings.
It is a remarkable circumstance that the undulation or wave made by the wing of an insect, bat, or bird, when those animals are fixed or hovering before an object, and when they are flying, corresponds in a marked manner with the track described by the stationary and progressive waves in fluids, and likewise with the waves of sound. This coincidence would seem to argue an intimate relation between the instrument and the medium on which it is destined to operate--the wing acting in those very curves into which the atmosphere is naturally thrown in the transmission of sound. Can it be that the animate and inanimate world reciprocate, and that animal bodies are made to impress the inanimate in precisely the same manner as the inanimate impress each other? This much seems certain:--The wind communicates to the water similar impulses to those communicated to it by the fish in swimming; and the wing in its vibrations impinges upon the air as an ordinary sound does. The extremities of quadrupeds, moreover, describe waved tracks on the land when walking and running; so that one great law apparently determines the course of the insect in the air, the fish in the water, and the quadruped on the land.