The Emperor of Germany has not been slow in marking
his recognition of the achievements of Count von Zeppelin, the air-ship inventor. Before delivering a lecture at the Colonial Society in Berlin on Monday, Count Zeppelin was authorised to announce that the Order of the Red Eagle had been con- ferred on him, and read a letter in which the Kaiser, after describing Count Zeppelin's achievement as constituting an epoch-making advance in aerial navigation, stated his inten- tion to support the inventor in further experiments by placing the advice and experience of the Balloon Division of the Army at his disposal whenever he might desire. Count Zeppelin in his lecture gave a most interesting and candid account of his ascents at the Lake of Constance. He did not disguise the drawbacks of his system,—the enormous size of his air-ship, the danger of carrying so great a quantity of gas, and the brittleness of the material of which the machine was constructed. But there remained the facts that his air-ship had been able to attain a height of over three hundred yards above the lake, and to carry with it, in addition to the crew and ballast, provisions sufficient to last for ten days; that the speed attained was about ten yards a second (exactly the extreme speed at which a man can run); and that it was possible to guide the ship in any direction. Count Zeppelin has fairly earned his highly appropriate decoration of the Red Eagle.
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