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 conventional 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 representation, 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 particular, 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
