tleman with a small quantity in his coat pocket and four others discovered this fact on the ferryboat recently. The dropping of some small article on the recumbent bombs, a sudden jar, any one of a number of mishaps, might make the bomb-hurler the bomb-hurled, and these contingencies are so apparent that it is deemed that volunteers for the forlorn hope of an aviation storming-party would not be so numerous as seriously to incommode the officers who were trying to enumerate or identify them. Given a clear and inoffensive or undefensive city or town, calm and favorable atmosphere, an aeroplane that would ascend and travel without mischance or accident, and an aviator who was perfectly willing to be a martyr to the cause he was espousing with his bomb, and serious damage could be done to life and property, but all these conditions in a state of concentration are so very remote that that concentration would seem to be an utterly negligible factor. One most decisive negation to the transportation of high explosives in any unstable vehicle is the excellent probability of its not being maintained on an even keel, in which case an airship, balloon, or any other aerial carriage would be an instrument of its own destruction by the explosion of the bombs, or shells, charitably intended for the immolation of some one else.

So the chances would obtain in any attempted realization of the flights of imag

ery in aerial warfare between opposing fleets of aeroplanes; let a hostile current turn the ships topsy-turvy, and the bombs become exploded by concussion with any unyielding substance in the ship, and pyrotechnics and perdition are the inevitable result. Of course, were both fleets destroyed, the object of their would-be assault would be attained, but the object of strategic operations is the destruction of the enemy's forces, not the felo-de-se of

one's own.

In this article the argument against the feasible employment of airships in modern warfare has been portrayed dispassionately and without prejudice, and the conclusion seems to be that as at present constructed and aerigated, airships are valueless as weapons of precision and offensive destruction. Science, however, never makes an important discovery or improvement that is valueless, and the flotation in the air of the airships at Selfridge Field, or any other place, has demonstrated the incalculable value of the airship as a vantage ground for observation of any stable resource or active movement of the enemy. As scouts, spies or bases of discovery, the airship is of the greatest possible actual and prospective value, but as they are at present as gun or high-explosive carriages, they are too risky and uncertain to themselves. Hence as operatives against forts, cities or towns, we shall have to rely upon the excellent mortars

we at present have, and as hurlers of projectiles against hostile vessels at long at long range, reliance must be placed upon the heavy ordnance that bristles along our seacoast defenses, while for any vessels that attempt intimate association with our defenses, we must be content with the accurate torpedo-lines that made effectual chevaux-de-frise underneath our waters.

For the future? No one can predict what may be the marvelous resources yet

undeveloped in the womb of science and inventive genius, and when the parturition occurs, we can calculate the value to modern warfare of the improved airship, aeroplane, monoplane or biplane; until those improvements are made, we must rely on the stable weapon of offense and precision, and disbelieve in the value of an uncertain and unstable basis as an effective platform whence to effectively demolish any persons or things by projectiles.

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