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the car the apparatus belonging to the condenser. This apparatus will
require some little explanation, and your Excellencies will please to
bear in mind that my object, in the first place, was to surround myself
and cat entirely with a barricade against the highly rarefied atmosphere
in which I was existing, with the intention of introducing within this
barricade, by means of my condenser, a quantity of this same atmosphere
sufficiently condensed for the purposes of respiration. With this object
in view I had prepared a very strong perfectly air-tight, but flexible
gum-elastic bag. In this bag, which was of sufficient dimensions, the
entire car was in a manner placed. That is to say, it (the bag) was
drawn over the whole bottom of the car, up its sides, and so on, along
the outside of the ropes, to the upper rim or hoop where the net-work
is attached. Having pulled the bag up in this way, and formed a complete
enclosure on all sides, and at bottom, it was now necessary to fasten
up its top or mouth, by passing its material over the hoop of the
net-work--in other words, between the net-work and the hoop. But if the
net-work were separated from the hoop to admit this passage, what was
to sustain the car in the meantime? Now the net-work was not permanently
fastened to the hoop, but attached by a series of running loops or
nooses. I therefore undid only a few of these loops at one time, leaving
the car suspended by the remainder. Having thus inserted a portion of
the cloth forming the upper part of the bag, I refastened the loops--not
to the hoop, for that would have been impossible, since the cloth
now intervened--but to a series of large buttons, affixed to the cloth
itself, about three feet below the mouth of the bag, the intervals
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