Well, now, look here; You hundred, who believe in the realization of your dreams, are throwing your thousands of dollars not into water but into space! You are fighting the impossible!" Strange as it was that at this affirmation the members of the Weldon Institute did not move.

Had they become as deaf as they were patient?
Or were they reserving themselves to see how far this audacious contradictor would dare to go?
Robur continued: "What?
A balloon! When to obtain the raising of a couple of pounds you require a cubic yard of gas.

A balloon pretending to resist the wind by aid of its mechanism, when the pressure of a light breeze on a vessel's sails is not less than that of four hundred horsepower; when in the accident at the Tay Bridge you saw the storm produce a pressure of eight and a half hundredweight on a square yard.

A balloon, when on such a system nature has never constructed anything flying, whether furnished with wings like birds, or membranes like certain fish, or certain mammalia--" "Mammalia ?" exclaimed one of the members.
"Yes! Mammalia! The bat, which flies, if I am not mistaken! Is the gentleman unaware that this flyer is a mammal?
Did he ever see an omelette made of bat's eggs ?" The interrupter reserved himself for future interruption, and Robur resumed: "But does that mean that man is to give up the conquest of the air, and the transformation of the domestic and political manners of the old world, by the use of this admirable means of locomotion?
By no means.

As he has become master of the seas with the ship, by the oar, the sail, the wheel and the screw, so shall he become master of atmospherical space by apparatus heavier than the air--for it must be heavier to be stronger than the air!" And then the assembly exploded.