264 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE 



had hitherto represented a galloping horse. Mr. 

 Muybridge had, by means of beautiful photographs 

 of twenty momentary successive attitudes, recently 

 shown, beyond possibility of cavil, that the con- 

 ventional representation was totally untrue to fact. 

 I asked myself the question why observant artists had 

 agreed for so long a time in drawing galloping horses 

 with their four legs extended simultaneously, and why 

 their representation had never been objected to. It 

 occurred to me that composites of successive attitudes 

 that were too momentary to be distinguished might 

 answer the question, which it did. When all of the 

 twenty attitudes are combined in a single picture, the 

 result is certainly suggestive of the conventional repre- 

 sentation, though in a very confused way. Then, 

 finding by my own observation that it was difficult to 

 watch all four legs at the same time, also seeing that 

 according to the photographs of Mr. Muybridge, the 

 two fore legs were extended during one quarter of a 

 complete motion, and that during another quarter the 

 two hind legs were similarly extended, I made 

 composites of these groups separately. Then, cutting 

 them in half and uniting the front half of the former 

 to the hind half of the latter, a very fair equivalent 

 was obtained to the conventional attitude. I inferred 

 that the brain ignored one-half of all it saw in the 

 gallop, as too confused to be noticed ; that it divided 

 the other half in two parts, each alike in one parti- 

 cular, and combined the two halves into a monstrous 

 whole. 



This is a convenient place to speak of the method 

 of stereoscopic maps, which I devised so long ago as 

 1863. It was published together with specimens made 



