THE NEW OPHTHALMOLOGY 441 



sociology. Our striving is for human betterment: because all med- 

 icine is preeminently philanthropic. The beclouded or befogged 

 mariner orients himself by means of an optical instrument, and 

 as the sun and the sun's winds bear the sun-made clouds back to 

 the far-away mountains again, so vision and optical eyes and in- 

 struments again complete the morbid and therapeutic circle, the 

 cure which is always beginning and never complete. 



My contention is that here is a great means of civilization. It 

 is a profoundly important thing that the hopeful Carlyle of the 

 Characteristics should have become the pessimist of Shooting Nia- 

 gara and After. It is civilization's tragedy that Nietzsche should 

 have had havoc played with his mind by eye-strain; that Huxley 

 should have been driven from work at the height of his powers; 

 that DeQuincey should have been an opium-eater; that Darwin 

 should have been able to work but two hours a day with his eyes, 

 and Parkman but a few minutes. Is it not a sad thing that George 

 Eliot and her books, Symonds and his great opportunity, Taine 

 and his great scholarship, should have suffered as they did? Is it 

 not a pathetic source of social misery that 10 or 20 per cent of eyes 

 are incapable of sewing, typewriting, book-keeping, lathe-work, 

 studying, draughting, and a still sadder thing that their owners 

 have no knowledge of the fact, and that they should suffer until 

 "break-down" comes? Is it not an awful thing that from 40 to 

 60 per cent of all school-children are sickly? That suicide is in- 

 creasing, insanity and epilepsy incurable, hospitals multiplying, 

 -and taxes, and prisons, and war, and want? A certain, perhaps 

 a large per cent of all these backward school-children, epileptics, 

 prisoners, insane, hysterics, neurasthenics, dyspeptics, have such 

 eyes that glasses correcting their optical defects would bring 

 them much relief, would often have prevented much or all of their 

 tragedy. And the proof is this: put any pair of such spectacles 

 on any one of us, and within an hour there would be headache, 

 giddiness, vomiting, or intense suffering. The cynics and skeptics 

 of "eye-strain exaggeration" can be speedily converted whenever 

 they are earnest enough to try a simple experiment upon them- 

 selves. It is a truth awful in its significance that in civilized coun- 

 tries there are millions of people who are good products of the evo- 

 lutionary mill, who have sound minds and good bodies, but who 

 are partial or complete failures, always with intense personal suf- 

 fering, simply because of an infinitesimal malcurvature of the cor- 

 nea, a too long, or a too short eyeball, no greater than the thick- 

 ness of a sheet of thin paper. It is the little thing that, overlooked 

 by others, makes or mars all undertakings, all sciences, and all 

 cosmic proceeding. The compass guides the ship and without it 

 there would be no civilization as we see it. Without vaccine virus 



