ABSTRACT
The term ‘palaeoscopy’ is a Greek compound meaning ‘seeing the old,’ implying that it is already a developed science with its own instruments. Millbank is partly modelled on Eadweard Muybridge, the UK-born photographer, who from 1877 to 1885 produced a series of studies called Animal Locomotion using horses and human subjects. In 1878, he displayed a panorama of San Francisco and during the 1880s, he gave exhibitions using a device called a Zoopraxiscope, which displayed movement through a rapid sequence of stills mounted on a disc. Several large cameras lay promiscuously about. Reliable news had been telegraphed to the city concerning some mining property in the neighbourhood of Tucson. Milne’s prescience over the emerging technology of film is reflected in the fact that in 1895 a cinematic device was exhibited in New York called the Eidoloscope.
