this on account of our having no objects about us by which to estimate our velocity, and on account of our going with the wind.  To be sure, whenever we meet a balloon we have a chance of perceiving our rate, and then, I admit, things do not appear so very bad.  Accustomed as I am to this mode of travelling, I cannot get over a kind of giddiness whenever a balloon passes us in a current directly overhead.  It always seems to me like an immense bird of prey about to pounce upon us and carry us off in its claws.  One went over us this morning about sunrise, and so nearly overhead that its drag-rope actually brushed the network suspending our car, and caused us very serious apprehension.  Our captain said that if the material of the bag had been the trumpery varnished “silk” of five hundred or a thousand years ago, we should inevitably have been damaged.  This silk, as he explained it to me, was a fabric composed of the entrails of a species of earth-worm.  The worm was carefully fed on mulberries —­ kind of fruit resembling a water-melon —­ and, when sufficiently fat, was crushed in a mill.  The paste thus arising was called papyrus in its primary state, and went through a variety of processes until it finally became “silk.”  Singular to relate, it was once much admired as an article of female dress!  Balloons were also very generally constructed from it.  A better kind of material, it appears, was subsequently found in the down surrounding the seed-vessels of a plant vulgarly called euphorbium, and at that time botanically termed milk-weed.  This latter kind of silk was designated as silk-buckingham, on account of its superior durability, and was usually prepared for use by being varnished with a solution of gum caoutchouc —­ a substance which in some respects must have resembled the gutta percha now in common use.  This caoutchouc was occasionally called Indian rubber or rubber of twist, and was no doubt one of the numerous fungi.  Never tell me again that I am not at heart an antiquarian.

Talking of drag-ropes —­ our own, it seems, has this moment knocked a man overboard from one of the small magnetic propellers that swarm in ocean below us —­ a boat of about six thousand tons, and, from all accounts, shamefully crowded.  These diminutive barques should be prohibited from carrying more than a definite number of passengers.  The man, of course, was not permitted to get on board again, and was soon out of sight, he and his life-preserver.  I rejoice, my dear friend, that we live in an age so enlightened that no such a thing as an individual is supposed to exist.  It is the mass for which the true Humanity cares.  By-the-by, talking of Humanity, do you know that our immortal Wiggins is not so original in his views of the Social Condition and so forth, as his contemporaries are inclined to suppose?  Pundit assures me that the same ideas were put nearly in the same way, about a thousand years ago, by an Irish philosopher called Furrier, on account of his keeping a retail shop for cat peltries and other furs.  Pundit knows, you know; there can be no mistake about it.  How very wonderfully do we see verified every day, the profound observation of the Hindoo Aries Tottle (as quoted by Pundit) —­ “Thus must we say that, not once or twice, or a few times, but with almost infinite repetitions, the same opinions come round in a circle among men.”