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 ii, 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. lo 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 both fore and hind legs. 



