DISEASES OF THE EYES. 71 



pendent for their vision upon some contrivance in the form of 

 spectacles 1 I remember a person, many years ago, offering to the 

 notice of the Board of Ordnance an artificial eye for a horse ; but 

 I have no knowledge of ever having witnessed any attempts at 

 adapting eye-glasses to animals : though the one experiment 

 appears to be about as feasible or as ridiculous as the other. 



There is yet another manifest disadvantage the veterinarian 

 labours under in his ophthalmic practice, one that used to be 

 urged by Professor Coleman — who devoted his mind a good deal to 

 the subject of the e3'e — and that is, supposing a man to have dis- 

 ease or defect in his eye, and a surgeon only so far remedies it as 

 to give him imperfect vision, or vision through the aid of glasses, 

 his patient is thankful, and departs in a measure satisfied : but 

 unless the veterinary surgeon be able to restore completely, or 

 nearly so, the eyesight of his patient, he has very likely rendered 

 the horse worse fitted for his work than if he had destroyed vision 

 altogether ; it being a notorious fact that a horse that shies through 

 imperfection of sight is a more dangerous servant than one totally 

 Wind. 



Although the catalogue of diseases of horses' eyes, framed ac- 

 cording to our present knowledge of them, is certainly, contrasted 

 with the surgeon's list, a contracted one, yet is there one disease — 

 or one class of diseases — which exerts terrible havock on our pa- 

 tients, and over which, unfortunately, we possess less controul than 

 perhaps over any other disease, taking the range of every other 

 part of the body. The diseased action, whatever be its nature and 

 cause, appears to be one peculiar to the horse species* : man's eye 

 is affected by nothing like it, nor, that I am aware, is the eye of 

 any other animal ; consequently, it becomes confined to the practice 

 of the veterinarian, and from him alone can receive that expo- 



* It is a mistake to suppose that the disease is never seen in the eyes of 

 mules and asses. While I was in the Peninsula, serving in the Artiller}^, I 

 found mules especialhj subject to malignant diseases — to farcy, and glanders, 

 and grease, and ophthalmia (and to mange) — which were evidently bred in 

 the filthy confined sheds they stood crowded together in. In fact, both 

 mules and asses I believe to be much 5<j/?er-constitutioned, and therefore 

 more susceptible animals than horses. 



