Whenever the author has consciously derived assistance from the work of previous investigators, due acknowledgment has been made; the present work is, however, in the main, a connected series of personal investigations. Should the author inadvertently have put forward as new, results that have been previously published or methods that have been previously employed, he can at least claim in mitigation of the offence that very many of the present investigations were actually done more than ten years ago; the work has only been withheld to the present date in order that publication might take the form of a complete and connected account of the mechanical principles of flight such as could be the better understood by, and be of the greater service to, the Scientific and Engineering World.
In offering to the public the first instalment of the present work, the author desires to record his conviction that the time is near when the study of Aerial Flight will take its place as one of the foremost of the applied sciences, one of which the underlying principles furnish some of the most beautiful and fascinating problems in the whole domain of practical dynamics.
In order that real and consistent progress should be made in Aerodynamics and Aerodonetics, apart from their application in the engineering problem of mechanical flight, it is desirable, if not essential, that provision should be made for the special and systematic study of these subjects in one or more of our great Universities, provision in the form of an adequate endowment with proper scope for its employment under an effective and enlightened administration.
The importance of this matter entitles it to rank almost as a National obligation; for the country in which facilities are given for the proper theoretical and experimental study of flight will inevitably find itself in the best position to take the lead in its application and practical development. That this must be
