In England the movie theater was originally called "The Bioscope," because of its visual presentation of the actual movements of the forms of life (from Greek bios, way of life). The movie, by which we roll up the real world on a spool in order to unroll it as a magic carpet of fantasy, is a spectacular wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric world. In the chapter on The Wheel, the story was told of how the movie had a kind of symbolic origin in an attempt to photograph the flying hooves of galloping horses, for to set a series of cameras to study animal movement is to merge the mechanical and the organic in a special way. In the medieval world, curiously the one static form for another, in sequence. They imagined the life of a flower as a kind of cinematic strip of phases for essences. The movie is the total realization of the medieval idea of change, in the form of an entertaining illusion. Physiologists had very much to do with the development of film, as they did with the telephone. On film the mechanical appears as organic, and the growth of a flower can be portrayed as easily and as freely as the movement of a horse.
