SIGHT AND SEEING IN ANCIENT TIMES 413 



SIGHT AND SEEING IN ANCIENT TIMES 



By Dr. CHARLES WILLIAM SUPER 



ATHENS, O. 



« 



YT7 HEN we pass along the streets of our cities and large towns and 

 * * observe the number of persons between the ages of twenty and 

 forty who wear spectacles; or again, if we inspect the eyesight of the 

 children of our public schools and of the young people in our colleges, 

 we find that a large proportion of the present generation is afflicted 

 with visual organs more or less defective. More than this, there is 

 hardly a person over fifty who does not use some sort of artificial 

 aid to sight. In the German universities the situation is still worse. 

 There, apparently, almost one half of the students wear eye-glasses. 

 England furnishes a marked contrast; spectacles on the eyes of young 

 men and young women are far less common. The chief reason doubt- 

 less is the fondness of both sexes for outdoor life. It is highly probable 

 that our somewhat abnormal eyesight is chiefly due to the abnormal 

 conditions under which we live. The epithet abnormal is of course to 

 be understood in a relative sense ; it is not strictly applicable to a highly 

 developed stage of civilization. It can not properly be said that the 

 conditions under which the Papuans or the Bushmen live are more 

 natural than those of the residents of London or New York. Each 

 generation is, in a sense, weaker but also wiser; what is lost in one 

 direction is more than made up in another. Still, the injudicious 

 use of the eyes in artificial light and a short range of vision seem to 

 be inevitably imposed upon the dwellers in cities. It is a well-estab- 

 lished fact in hygiene that any bodily organ is strengthened by the 

 wise use of it. This being the case, it follows that persons who spend 

 much of their time out-of-doors and in looking at objects afar off, 

 or who use their eyes but little after nightfall, will retain their sight 

 unimpaired much longer than do most people of the present day. On 

 the other hand, failing vision is the natural concomitant of advancing 

 age, so that the number of persons beyond sixty who see clearly with the 

 naked eye is exceedingly small and probably was never very large. 



Moreover, the human eye is said to be a rather ill-contrived piece 

 of mechanism. A celebrated German physicist is reported to have 

 remarked that if an artisan were to make for him a piece of apparatus 

 so poorly adapted to its purpose he would not accept it. Biographers 

 have, however, preserved the names of a considerable number of persons 

 from the remote and more recent past whose mental faculties were 

 unimpaired at fourscore and beyond, though it is not often that this 

 could be affirmed of their sight. The last chapter of Deuteronomy 



