54 THE PROBLEM OF THE GALLOPING HORSE 



and it is simply astonishing to find how utterly diffe- 

 rent they are from what had been supposed. Twenty 

 years ago Mr. Muybridge produced a number of these 

 instantaneous photographs of moving animals such as the 

 horse in gallop, trot, canter, amble, walk, and jumping and 

 bucking also the dog running, birds of several kinds 

 flying, camel, elephant, deer, and other animals in rapid 

 movement. The animals were photographed on a track 

 in front of a wall, marked out to show measured yards ; 

 the time was accurately recorded to show rate of move- 

 ment and length of exposure, and of interval between 

 successive pictures. By means of three cameras worked 

 by electric shutter-openers, a side, a back, and a front view 

 of the animal were taken simultaneously. Repeated photo- 

 graphs were obtained at intervals of a fraction of a second, 

 giving a series of fifteen or twenty pictures of the moving 

 animal. The length of exposure for each picture was 

 one fortieth of a second or less, and the interval between 

 successive pictures was about the same. Muybridge's great 

 difficulty had been to invent a shutter which would act 

 rapidly enough. I have some of these pictures before me 

 now (see PI. I). They show that what has been drawn by 

 artists and called the " flying gallop," in which the legs are 

 fully extended and all the feet are off the ground, with the 

 hind hoofs turned upwards, never occurs at all in the gal- 

 loping horse, nor anything in the least like it. There is a 

 fraction of a second when all four legs of the galloping 



PLATE I. Figs, i to u, drawings from Muybridge's photographs of con- 

 secutive poses of the galloping horse, each photograph taken by an 

 exposure of one fortieth of a second and separated from the next by 

 an interval of one fortieth of a second. The horse in Fig. 10 has 

 returned to the same pose as that with which the series starts in Fig. i. 

 Fig. ii gives a pose one hundredth of a second later in the series 

 than that taken in Fig. 2. Fig. 12 shows a combination of the hinder 

 half of Fig. 9 with the front half of Fig. 6, giving thus the maximum 

 extension of boih fore and hind legs. 



