174 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



at than ours in reading. That they will deteriorate 

 still further in this direction, and from being a 

 spectacled people become a blind one, to the joy 

 of their enemies, is not likely to happen, and prob- 

 ably the decadence has been a great deal exagger- 

 ated. Animals living in darkness become near- 

 sighted, and then nearer-sighted still, and so on 

 progressively until the vanishing point is reached. 

 In a community or nation a similar decline might 

 begin from much reading of German books, or 

 perpetual smoking of pipes with big china bowls, 

 or from some other unknown cause ; but the decay 

 could not progress far, because there is nothing in 

 man to take the place of sight, as there is in the 

 blind cave rats and fishes and insects. And if we 

 could survey mankind from China to Peru with 

 all the scientific appliances which are brought to 

 bear on the Board-school children in London, and 

 on the nation generally, the differences in the 

 powers of vision in the various races, nations, and 

 tribes, would probably appear very insignificant: 

 The mistake which eye specialists and writers on 

 the eye make is that they think too much about 

 the eye. When they affirm that the conditions of 

 our civilization are highly injurious to the sight, 

 do they mean all the million conditions, or sets of 

 conditions, embraced by our system, with the 

 infinite variety of occupations and modes of living 

 which men have, from the lighthouse-keeper to 

 the worker underground, whose day is the dim 

 glimmer of a miner 's lamp 1 l * An organ exercised 



