  IN throwing out ballast or any small article from a balloon, a certain degree of caution is requisite, as a bottle or any similar object falls with such velocity that were it to strike the roof of a cottage, it would go right through it. We are told that Gray-Lussac, in an ascent in 1804, threw out a common deal chair from a height of twenty-three thousand feet. It fell beside a country girl, who was tending some sheep in a field, and, as the balloon was invisible, she concluded, and so did wiser heads than hers, that the chair must have fallen straight down from heaven. No one was skeptical enough to deny it, for there was the chair, or rather its remains. The most the incredulous could venture to do was to criticise the coarse workmanship of the miraculous seat, and they were busy carping and fault-finding with the celestial upholstery, when an account of M. Gray-Lussac's voyage was published, and extinguished at once the discussion and the miracle.—Chambers' Journal. double line decoration |
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