Excerpt from The Military Surgeon, 1923, Vol. 52: Journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States After more than two thousand years of attempted flight, in which many lives have been lost and hearts broken by failure, aviation is an accomplished fact. Alphonse Berget in 1911 wrote: If aerial navigation counts its victors - alas! It numbers also its victims. The conquest of the air, like all other conquests, has its battlefields strewn with the remains of its heroes. In its two forms it has already a long martyrology. It is very certain that no one factor serves more to retard the prog ress of flying than the conviction of the public mind that aviation is too dangerous to be either practicable or profitable. Hence, the future of flying really depends upon such scientific working out of the important problems of pilot and plane that safety in the air will be ensured. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.