ide is,--in another, how much the knee is bent,--in a third, how
curiously the heel strikes the ground before the rest of the foot,--in
all, how singularly the body is accommodated to the action of walking.
The facts which the brothers Weber, laborious German experimenters and
observers, had carefully worked out on the bony frame, are illustrated
by the various individuals comprising this moving throng. But what a
wonder it is, this snatch at the central life of a mighty city as it
rushed by in all its multitudinous complexity of movement! Hundreds of
objects in this picture could be identified in a court of law by their
owners. There stands Car No. 33 of the Astor House and Twenty-Seventh
Street Fourth Avenue line. The old woman would miss an apple from that
pile which you see glistening on her stand. The young man whose back is
to us could swear to the pattern of his shawl. The gentleman between two
others will no doubt remember that he had a headache the next morning,
after this walk he is taking. Notice the caution with which the man
driving the dapple-gray horse in a cart loaded with barrels holds his
reins,--wide apart, one in each hand. See the shop-boys with their
bundles, the young fellow with a lighted cigar in his hand, as you see
by the way he keeps it off from his body, the _gamin_ stooping to
pick up something in the midst of the moving omnibuses, the stout
philosophical carman sitting on his cart-tail, Newman Noggs by the
lamp-post at the corner. Nay, look into Car No. 33 and you may see the
passengers;--is that a young woman's face turned toward you looking
out of the window? See how the faithful sun-print advertises the rival
establishment of "Meade Brothers, Ambrotypes and Photographs." What a
fearfully suggestive picture! It is a leaf torn from the book of God's
recording angel. What if the sky is one great concave mirror, which
reflects the picture of all our doings, and photographs every act on
which it looks upon dead and living surfaces, so that to celestial eyes
the stones on which we tread are written with our deeds, and the leaves
of the forest are but undeveloped negatives where our summers stand
self-recorded for transfer into the imperishable record? And what a
metaphysical puzzle have we here in this simple-looking paradox! Is
motion but a succession of rests? All is still in this picture of
universal movement. Take ten thousand instantaneous photographs of the
great thoroughfare in a day; ev