Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/629

 being devised by which a number of pictures of a moving object are taken in succession, thus showing the movement gone through in all its details. These arrangements are of different kinds, designed to take ten, twenty, forty, or even more photographs a second of the same object. Perhaps the first to devise an effective apparatus of this kind was Mr. Muybridge, of San Francisco. He employed a number of cameras placed in a line. The path of the running man, galloping horse, or whatever the object was, was crossed by threads, which were broken in succession by the object. Each of these threads actuated the shutter of a camera, and thus Mr. Muybridge secured some really brilliant results, of great value to the anatomist and to the artist. Other motions beside running were in the same way intercepted by threads, and equally good pictures were made. M. Marey, whose name has been already mentioned, saw a number of these pictures in Paris, and was greatly impressed with the value of such productions in such researches in animal motion as he was then conducting. He set to work himself to invent a single instrument which should produce the same results, and shortly brought into practical use his "Gun Camera," working on the principle of the revolving pistol, and fitted with a stock and butt in the manner of an ordinary gun. With this a bird could be covered in its flight, and a very rapid succession of exposures given, each of 1/720 of a second in duration. Other machine cameras were invented in this country by Messrs. Greene & Evans and others, and the latest of these instruments are, of course, worked by electricity, an intermittent current crowding a marvellous number of separate exposures into a single second. Odd as many of the moving animals in the pictures thus produced appear to our unaccustomed eyes, it needs but to place them in their proper order in the Zoetrope or a similar instrument, to observe the reproduction of the motions as we see them in the most marvellously natural manner.

Herr Anschütz has carried this branch of instantaneous work to a very high degree of perfection. He has a very admirable series of photographs of soldiers marching—too long a series to be reproduced here, although we give two, showing very different stages of the step. Of the series which give all the successive motions of a horse and rider taking a jump, we select four concerned in the most interesting part of the feat—the actual leap itself. Perhaps the most striking of these photographs is the first. A close examination will show that the horse is actually standing on one leg, about the last attitude one would imagine a horse to adopt in "taking off" for a jump. The two hind legs, it will be observed, are drawn up together, preparatory to bringing them down against the ground to give impetus to the spring. In