i24 Remarks on the Case of Miss M^Avoy. 



print at only one-sixth part of that distance from the light. 

 Here, then, in a small party, indiscriminately assembled, it ii 

 shown, that one individual could discern an object by means ol 

 one-thirty-sixth part of tlie light which was necessary to enable 

 another to see the same object. — This experiment was necessarily 

 limited, by the dimensions of the apartment : but, I am inclined 

 to believe, that the same gentleman would have succeeded in 

 reading at ten times the distance from the candle at which I 

 found it necessary to station myself for the same purpose : or, 

 in other words, he could have read the print alluded to, when it 

 was illumined by the one-hundredth part only of that hght which 

 I required to enable me to peruse the same print. 



" I have now before me a very extensive and most singular 

 work, called Wonders of the Little PVor Id, which, contains about 

 700 pages, and abounds with cases as marvellous as that of Miss 

 M'Avoy. As I have little faith in this apocryphal folio of Wan- 

 ley ,it would be unfair, in me, to adduce instances from his work j 

 or I could tell of one sharp-sighted fellow, who could ' see and 

 discern out right 135 miles;' — of another, named Julianus, a 

 monk, that, ' for the space of seventy years, never lishted uor 

 had a candle ; who nevertheless was used to read books through- 

 out in the darkness of the night ;' — and of a third, who, when 

 he was young, used, in the night-time, to * compose very ele- 

 gant verses, and write them down exactly by the light which 

 issued out of his own eyes.' I know nothing on record resem- 

 bling the last feat, except it be in the memoirs of Munchausen, 

 where we read, that the hero having lost his flint, placed his 

 head immediately above the pan of his fowling-piece, and, giving 

 himseU" a smart blow, made his 'eye strike fire,' and thus ig- 

 nited the powder. 



" To return to the subject, however, and to be serious: It is of 

 some consequence, in the investigation of the case of Miss M'Avoy, 

 to pay attention to the wonderful diversity which prevails in the 

 powers of the visual organs ; and I cannot refrain from tran- 

 scribing the following curious circumstance, which has recently 

 appeared in the public journals. 



" ' In the conversation between some English gentleman and 

 Bonaparte, at St. Helena; the former speaking of the Cossacks, 

 — Napoleon said, that ' they resembled the Bedouin Arabs m the 

 gift of vision : so great in this respect was the faculty ot the Be- 

 douins, that, when in Egypt, upon an occasion when he wished, 

 by means of his telescope, to observe a body of men that ap- 

 peared iti the horizon, he had scarcely levelled his glass, when a 

 Bedouin, near him, recognised with his naked eye another Be- 

 douin, and described his dress, &;c. so as to distinguish the tribe 

 to which he belonged.' 



« Now, 



