THE president's ADDRESS. 193 



Though it would not be irrelevant to my present argument, I 

 shall not stop to show, as I might show, that this monograph of 

 mine has been received with favour wherever a scientific literature 

 exists, but it may be adjuvant to instance, — as far as English 

 literature is concerned,— that in the most recent Treatise on 

 Diseases of the Eye, that by Haynes Walton, only a few months 

 from the press, one of the most extreme of my physiological 

 inductions has been incorporated, that is to say, that that work 

 gives from my monograph an account of the structure and 

 properties of the vitreous humour as determined by entoptical 

 investigation ; whereas all other entoptical observers, mislead by 

 a radical misinterpretation of the phenomena they witnessed, 

 have regarded this part of the eye as positively structureless in 

 the adult, but as exhibiting nevertheless the remnants of a 

 texture that was essential to it in the foetal state, or else as 

 exhibiting morbid products ; neither of which useless things are 

 in it. 



But my immediate cue is with Grermany. About three quarters 

 of a year from the date of its publication the book was noticed 

 in that standard periodical Schmidt's Jahrbiicher der gesammten 

 Medicin, viz. : in the No. for February 1865. In it Dr. Geissler, 

 well-known by his work on Verletzungen des Auges, passes on 

 from commenting on the absence of any previous monograph on 

 entoptics to say, as it may be rendered into English: — "The 

 author has now undertaken this problem and has solved it, 

 whilst furnishing a foundation for the literature that belongs to 

 it — and not without having made studies that are pecu.liar to 

 himseK — in a manner most highly worthy of recognition. The 

 little book, which is illustrated with numerous woodcuts, is also, 

 for us Germans, in every respect, an interesting thesis, wherein, 

 without neglect of mathematical calculation, the relations are 

 depicted with brevity and clearness, and in a lively style of 

 writing," and so on in a strain of undeviating commendation. 

 I may append, as evincing that this was not a singular or 

 transitory opinion among those who speak German or its dialects, 

 that less than three years since I received, if possible, still 

 greater compliments from the lips of Donders himself, whom 

 I have so often spoken of to-day, and who is so famed as 

 professor of physiology and ophthalmology in the University of 

 Utrecht. 



D 



