488 THE EXTERIOR OF THE HORSE. 



enlargement, they were always wanting in details and form, resembling more a 

 Chinese chromo than a true portrait. 



To-day the improvements made in the apparatus enable us to take larger 

 photographs ; many amateurs have produced excellent, well-formed, very dis- 

 tinct, and precise proofs for the scientific man as well as for the artist. 



But these portraits, however well they may have been executed, only show 

 the isolated attitudes, and not the succession of all the phases of the gait passed 

 through by the animal. 



In this respect the labors of Muybridge had not yet been surpassed, when, 

 quite recently, 1 M. Ottomar Anschiitz, of Lissa (Germany), announced new results. 

 He sent to Paris, towards the end of the year 1888, a series of beautiful instan- 

 taneous photographs reproducing the fast walk, the trot, the slow gallop, the fast 

 gallop, and leaping. Each of these gaits is here represented by twenty suc- 

 cessive positions, taken at very short and probably equal intervals of time, 

 although, according to the author, the intervals between the various photographs 

 were not exactly measured. A scale, graduated in metres and decimetres, placed 

 along the trail described by the animal, allows the appreciation of the length of 

 the diverse bases of support, the separation and the position of the members in 

 the air, the total length of the step, and, finally, the space embraced by each of 

 the members. 



x The Lissa photographs, to which we will make numerous references in the 

 course of this work, show a considerable improvement over those from San Fran- 

 cisco, although M. Anschiitz has not yet divulged the secret of his process. We 

 would find them absolutely irreproachable if the intervals between the photo- 

 graphs were known. Unfortunately, this important omission prevents the deduc- 

 tion from them of a certain number of interesting scientific facts. Nevertheless, 

 such as they are, artists will consult them with advantage. 



The instantaneous photographs, when multiplied and scattered abroad, will 

 soon appear less fantastical ; painters and sculptors will in the long run draw from 

 them those ideas which will give their works that stamp of accuracy and truth 

 which is but too often conspicuous by its absence. The attentive observation of 

 animals in motion, now that we have been warned of those phenomena which the 

 eye was at first unable to seize, will become incontestably more perfect. Little by 

 little animal painters will abandon the fictitious and fantastic attitudes to which 

 they have accustomed us, and will show us more and more animated Nature as 

 she is, and not as the imagination or our inexperience leads us to conceive. 



b. Chrono-photographs. M. Marey has gone a step farther in this direc- 

 tion. By means of an extremely ingenious experimental process, he has been 

 able to take upon the same immobile plate, and at equal intervals of time, a series 

 of photographs representing the different positions which an animal in move- 

 ment has occupied in space during a series of known instants. 



" Let us suppose," says he. 2 " that an apparatus be turned towards the path of a man walk- 

 ing, and that we take a first image in a very short time. If the plate preserve its sensibility, we 

 would be able at the end of an instant to take another image which would show the walker in a 



1 For more details see G. Barrier, Presentation de nouvelles photographies instantan^es rela- 

 tives aux allures du cheval, in Bulletin de la Socit centrale de m6decine vterinaire, 14 FSvrier, 

 1889. 



2 Marey, Comptes-Rendus de l'Acad6mie des sciences, 3 Juillet, 1882. Id., Developpement de 

 la melhode graphique par 1'emploi de la photographic, Paris, 1884. 



