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31 January 1902
161, King's Road, Kingston-on-Thames
President Jordan
Dear Sir,
I duly received your esteemed form of 26 Dec last, and note with much pleasure your communication of the two books you have been good enough to accept for the library of the University over which you preside, and I therefore beg to say that well knowing your own views in regard to scientific research, and having at my command a few copies of the works, I shall feel delighted to place a copy of either or both of them at your disposal, should you be able to make use of them.
With regard to the zoopraxiscope, I am afraid I did not express myself with sufficient lucidity, it was not the apparatus with which the pictures were made, that I intended to recommend to your favorable consideration, but the instrument by means of which the various photographed phases are consecutively projected on a screen for the synthetical reconstruction of the original movement, this apparatus I devised, on the system originated by Plateau [Plato] and was used by me at the many universities and the other institutions of science and art in America and in Europe where my lectures on animal locomotion were given, and
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where its value as an educational factor was endorsed by such men as those whose names you many find in Appendix A "The Human Figure in Motion."
From the fact of this same apparatus having been devised and constructed for the express purpose of demonstrating the truths revealed by the first photographic investigation ever made of the changes incidental to motion of any kind and all taking place on the site of your university under the special auspices of its founders, I thought its acquisition might commend itself both to you and Mrs. Stanford as not only for the use to which it might be put in your lecture halls, but as an interesting evidence, of the interest Senator and Mrs. Stanford and their son took in scientific research long before the founding of the university took any practical shape.
I am obliged for your suggestion and have by this day's mail written to Mrs. Stanford on the subject, but not knowing whether she has returned to Palo Alto and not wishing my letter to go astray, I have taken the liberty of addressing it to your care with the hope that you will kindly hand it to her - if absent - upon her return.
Faithfully yours
Eadweard Muybridge
