Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/28

18 looking at the horse in motion. A difference may be marked here from what is the case with man; for, among the pictures of men talking, taken casually or methodically, besides those which are never seen with the eye, some also appear which correspond with the common idea of a walking man. The difference depends upon the fact that the moment in which the outstretched fore legs of the racing horse make their longer pause does not coincide with the one in which the backward-thrown hind legs do so. Both of these situations are apt to impress themselves upon the eye and blend in the resultant conception of the racer, but instantaneous photography catches them one after the other.

An American illustrated journal, in 1882, had a picture of a hurdle-race, in which all the horses appeared in real attitudes, borrowed from the Muybridge photographs, as only the fast-receiving plate can see them. Prof. Eder, of Vienna, communicated these suggestive sketches to us in a paper on instantaneous photography, and a rarer spectacle is hardly conceivable. But when the series of pictures of a periodically moved object taken at sufficiently short intervals, whether it is presented to the eye in the dædaleum or each picture is illuminated for an instant in its passage, is well projected, the original thought of the Weber brothers is realized: the periodical motion, dissected as it were into differential pictures, is integrated again into an impression of the whole, and the accuracy of the apparently false pictures is demonstrated. The latter experiment has been worked out by Mr. Muybridge himself in his zoöpraxiscope, and among us by Herr Ottomar Anschütz, who manages instantaneous photography with extraordinary skill, in his electrical stroboscope. In both methods we see men and horses walking, running, jumping; but there is still one thing to be remarked that is, that since the length of the passage past the eye of one of the slits of the dædaleum or of the illumination of the directly visible picture is the same for all the pictures, the appearance of the whole impression of the movement is a little different from the view of the same movement itself. That the position in which both feet of the walking man are standing nevertheless preponderates in the impression, is due to tho fact that the motion of the legs becomes slower in approaching this position, so that their rapidly recurring pictures nearly cover one another.

Tho series of instantaneous pictures of an athlete during a severe exercise, which Mr. Muybridge and Herr Anschütz have taken are in themselves a rich source of instruction in the representation of the nude. Herr Anschütz's stroboscope shows us the spear-thrower and the quoit-caster in the different stages of