In december 1878, the possibility of such a pictorial solution was offered in the sequence of photographs of trotting and galloping horses published in the Parisian science journal La Nature. Eadweard Muybridge, Marey’s exact contemporary had taken them for Leland Stanford in California and Muybridge had been hired by Stanford to photograph his horses because Stanford had apparently seen Marey's tracings showing the horse suspended in the air at a certain point and wanted it proven by a photograph, that is a picture made by a machine that would not lie.	La méthode graphique…Supplément (1885) p. 10 La méthode graphique… Supplément (1885) p. 11
When Marey saw Muybridge's photographs he immediately sent letter to the pages of La Nature asking Muybridge if he would try his hand at photographing the flight of birds, but Marey himself did nothing further with photography. Instead, he continued his work on muscle fatigue, using a new myograph, and undertook a new set of cardiological experiments. In the fall of 1881 Marey saw the publication of his La circulation du sang à l'état physiologique et dans les maladies, his 750 pages summary of this work. In September Muybridge arrived in Paris and was feted by Marey who had invited scientists and artists to meet the photographer. But Marey saw Muybridge’s results, he was disappointed. Muybridge's horses tripped the camera shutters by breaking wires along the path of their movement and birds couldn't be made to do this. Muybridge used multiple cameras to capture the shape of a subject’s body at isolated - and quite far apart - phases of its motion. Marey wanted to have what his graphing machines had provided: the visible expression of a continuous passage of time over equidistant and known intervals within a single tracing.