THE NEW OPHTHALMOLOGY 439 



of civilization is all there and is of the same nature. See with 

 unbelievable accuracy if you would succeed, is the first verse of the 

 biologic decalogue. That is the physiologic Logos which became 

 the biologic flesh. 



But see inaccurately and you die, is the antithesis, and the ani- 

 mal which failed to obey perished, inevitably and quickly. The 

 savage did the same; your horse that stumbles is useless; your 

 playing child that hits its leg or trips becomes, at least, a very dif- 

 ferent child, and a very different man or woman from the others 

 who do not make these visual and coordinating blunders. Such 

 are the backward scholars in schools and, in large part, they are 

 your failures in life, society's expensive degenerates, defectives, 

 and dependents. And they are rapidly increasing in number with 

 every step in civilization, because every such step means the 

 entangling difficulty of added near vision. 



All of which and this is the heart of the matter all of which, 

 Darwin, a martyr to bad eyes himself, failed to see, and all of which 

 no evolutionist has since caught sight of. And yet it has been one 

 of the large controlling conditions of the evolution-process. For 

 not only has this unity of mathematic optics and physiologic func- 

 tion been the inescapable method of success in the struggle for 

 existence, but it has been one if not the chief mechanism whereby 

 the so-called unfit have been thrown out of the count. Visual 

 imperfection has been and is increasingly becoming one of the 

 dominating causes of the exclusion of the ontogeny from the pro- 

 pagating phylum. This is the fundamental distinction which dif- 

 ferentiates the laws of biologic evolution and survival of those with 

 and those without vision. It is the key which will unlock and re- 

 veal many of the profound mysteries of heredity and descent which 

 to-day are tormenting the different schools of evolutionists and 

 biologists. Open the door and walk into the long-closed ancestral 

 hall and the mystery of forbear and aftercomer is revealed. How 

 and why we are here is at once plain. None could have been, and 

 we could not now be, the link between the phylum of the past and 

 that of the future, except on the condition of seeing well. Those not 

 allowed to become such parental links were largely those who saw 

 too inaccurately to compete in the beneficent but summary process. 



Note well, however, two things: The most perfect organism in 

 the past world of animal and man was useless without, first, this 

 perfection of visual function, cerebral coordination, and muscular 

 response; and, second, the attainment of this optical mechanism 

 was far more transcendently difficult than any other physiologic 

 task. To attain transparency and nourishment of cornea, lens, 

 vitreous humor, and retinal end-organs, to superpose the images 

 of the two eyeballs, to respond to the almost nothing of stimulus, 



