Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/104

 �A protozoan, the simplest living animal organism

��The protozoan divided. Each one becomes two

�� ��How Life Begins

A wonderful motion -picture which shows how microscopic cells multiply and how butterflies and higher animals grow

���To photograph butterflies in the act of laying their eggs and to explain the development of the life that eventually emerges from the eggs, Mr. Stone invented the special camera and glass here shown

OF course you have seen on the screen those wonderful pictures in which a budding rose unfolds itself petal by petal, swells into full bloom and then shrivels and dies — all in five minutes. How is it thus possible photo- graphically, to compress spring, summer and autumn into a few hundred feet of film? The pictures are obviously real — and yet how dramatic- ally unreal is the ephemeral life that flourishes and dies before your eyes!

A motion-picture camera makes sixteen ex- posures per second. The resultant pictures are thrown upon the screen at the same rate. In- stead of taking sixteen pictures per second, sup- pose that one were taken every hour and suppose further that the sixteen positives, ultimately ob- tained, are run through the projecting machine in a single second. Obviously, a process which was photographed in sixteen hours would be re- vealed on the screen in one second.

Here we have the secret of the rapidly unfolding and withering rose. An automatic camera took a photograph of the flower two or three times a day, but the final film obtained was projected on the screen in a few minutes. The effect is as if a miracle were being performed before our eyes.

88

��*£ ^

��> it

�� ��^^

��m

��%•

�� ��m

��I

��./.

��Portion of the film showing divided protozoan's career

�� �