This is one of the rarest and most delightful of aeronautical fantasies and appeared as a coloured plate in a small work with a similar title published in Vienna in 1801. It is the most picturesque of the answers as to how one could make the wind-blown balloon navigable and obey orders. Bird-traction in the air has a venerable history stretching back to Antiquity and it was also one of the favourite methods of transporting fictional travellers to the moon. When the balloon was invented, it was an easy imaginative transition to harness birds to the new mode of transport and treat them as celestial steeds. The idea even appealed to quite serious investigators and appears as late as 1835 in a design by a certain Mr Machintosh for an aircraft to be propelled by a veritable bird galley, comprising sixteen eagles harness in frames. The idea is even now not quite dead, for a faint and curious echo of this bird traction tradition was seen in recent years in America where an ingenious and frivolous inventor attached bluebottle flies to miniature aeroplanes and used them successfully as power and propulsion units.