There is no positive news of Mr. Walter Powell's fate,
but in his case, no news is only too certainly bad news. Indeed, the finding of part of the mahogany frame of a thermometer used by him in the balloon in the sea, near Bridport, points to the very strong probability that the balloon did fall into the sea, as the best aeronauts seem to think that, from the insufficiency of the gas left in the balloon, it must have done. At the meeting of the Balloon Society held yesterday week at the Aquarium, there was a tendency to blame Captain Templer and Mr. Agg- Gardner for abandoning their companion, i.e., for so suddenly lightening the balloon as to render its shooting-up into the lowering clouds inevitable, though there was no supply of gas to keep it in the air. But on this subject we have not yet heard Captain Templer's and Mr. Agg-Gardner's own account, and we do not in the least believe that they did " abandon " him. The original account was that they were jerked out of the car, and the a priori doubt expressed in the Balloon Society whether they " could have been " jerked out of it, looks like the invincible desire to find some one to blame which an Englishman is apt to feel under an irreparable calamity. Why should there be in Englishmen a sense of com- pensation for loss in the right to scold?
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