SCIENCE AND FINE ART. 17 



vivantoscope ; but it is still not clear whether their purpose was 

 carried out. 



Dr. William Weber lived to see himself and his brother fully- 

 sustained, after nearly half a century, by instantaneous photog- 

 raphy. Mr. Eadweard Muybridge, of San Francisco, applied it 

 in 1872, at the suggestion of Mr. Stanford, to fix the attitudes of 

 horses in the successive positions of different paces. The same 

 phenomena were revealed in the photographs as in the Webers' 

 schematic drawings. Pictures came out the like of which nobody- 

 believed had ever really been seen.* Directed upon street scenes, 

 processions, etc., the camera took many views of men in quite as 

 astonishing positions as those which the brothers Weber had at- 

 tributed to them on theoretical grounds. It was not different 

 with the wonderful series of pictures of a flying bird and its wing- 

 strokes which M. Marey has obtained with his photographic gun.f 



The explanation of these facts is evidently- that, when an object 

 moves with periodically varying velocities, we get a stronger and 

 more durable impression of the situations in which it halts, and a 

 weaker and more fugitive one of those in which it moves swiftly. 

 Even without knowing this law, no painter will represent the 

 Black Forest clock in a peasant's room with a vertical pendu- 

 lum, for, if he did, every observer would ask why the clock was 

 stopped. For the pendulum, when it has swung to one side and 

 is about to return, necessarily stops for an instant, and this situa- 

 tion of pausing at one side impresses us more strongly than the 

 one in which the pendulum is passing through its point of equi- 

 librium with the greatest velocity. It is the same with the alter- 

 nately swinging legs of the walking man : he pauses longer in 

 the position in which both of his legs are at rest, and for the 

 shortest time in that in which the moving leg swings in front of 

 the resting leg. The last position and those near it, therefore, 

 make substantially no impression upon us. We figure to our- 

 selves the walking man, and the painter represents him accord- 

 ingly in the position in which between two steps he touches the 

 ground with both feet. 



Something very curious is observed in the running of the 

 horse. No matter how frequent the intervals at which the pict- 

 ure is taken, we never get the usual figure of a racing or hunting 

 horse as it comes to us from England, and as we see it in the 

 pictures that are hung up in the show-windows of the shops at 

 the time of races and hunts, and as it in fact strikes our eyes on 



* The Horse in Motion, as shown by Instantaneous Photography (London, 1S82) now 

 published under the title Animal Locomotion ; an Electro-photographic Investigation of 

 Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, etc. 



f Developpement de la Methode graphique par l'emploi de la Photographie. Supple- 

 ment, etc. Paris, 1885, pp. 12 et seq. 

 vol. xli. 2 



