August 17, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



275 



children by means of certain testing cards, and 

 to record the results. Sir Charles Elliott, who 

 has taken great interest in the examinations, 

 has appended an explanatory note to the re- 

 turn which has been made. 



The manner in which the eyesight test was 

 conducted, he states, was to hang up on the 

 wall of the school, in a good light, the test card 

 for distant vision and to mark on the floor a 

 line at a distance of 20 feet from the wall. At 

 this distance the children were required to read 

 certain lines of letters. It appears, from a 

 summary of the results, that of 338,920 chil- 

 dren tested, 259,523, or 76.6 per cent., were 

 found to have good sight, and 79,167, or 23.3 

 per cent., defective vision. The large number 

 of 2675 children were only able to see the 

 enormous top letter of the test card at a dis- 

 tance of 20 feet — a letter which is meant to 

 be read at a distance of about 200 feet. The 

 79,167 children were given notices to their 

 parents that they were suffering from ' serious 

 defective vision ' and advised to consult an 

 oculist without delay. Taking the figures in 

 the tables by School Board divisions it is seen 

 that by far the largest percentage of defective 

 vision is found in the city, where only 56.6 per 

 cent, of the children have good sight. The 

 other divisions where sight is below the average 

 are Westminster (where the percentage of those 

 having good sight is 67.7), Hackney (73.0), 

 Tower Hamlets (74.0), Finsbury (74.3), and 

 Southwark (74.9). Those in which the eye- 

 sight are above the average are Greenwich 

 (which has a percentage of 82.2 having good 

 sight). East Lambeth (78.7), West Lambeth 

 78.9), Chelsea (77.3), and Marylebone (77.1). 

 In these latter divisions the houses are less 

 dense and there are larger open spaces than 

 elsewhere. 



The figures, therefore, as far as they go, seem 

 to bear out the hypothesis of ' town vision ' ex- 

 pounded by Mr. Brudenell Carter in 1895, or, 

 in other words, it points to the injury to the 

 sight being caused by living in thickly-popu- 

 lated areas, where the eye has little oppor- 

 tunity of being exercised in distant vision. 

 Another curious result of the test is that the 

 proportion of good sight increases as the 

 children rise in the different standards, which 



broadly coincide with the ages of the children. 

 The percentage of good vision in Standard I. is 

 70.8 ; in IL, 74.9 ; in III., 77.0 ; in IV., 78.9 ; 

 in v., 80.3; in VI., 81.3; in VII., 82.9; and in 

 ex-VIL, 83.7. So that without a single break 

 the ratio rises with the standard as the age of 

 the children increases. But it may be doubted 

 whether this means an increase in the power 

 to see or only in accuracy of reading. Sir 

 Charles Elliott expresses the belief that the re- 

 corded rise is contrary to general medical 

 experience, and throws some doubt on the 

 value of the whole statistics. Mr. Bland, of 

 the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital, he 

 says, suggests the explanation that the bad re- 

 sults are partly due to weak power of reading 

 rather than weak sight. " The trained eye is 

 better able to discern letters than the untrained 

 eye, and it is probable that the children in the 

 higher standards achieved better results partly 

 on account of their training." 



The eyesight of girls appears to be inferior 

 to that of boys, and Mr. Carter, in the inquiry 

 made by him, seems to have arrived at similar 

 results and to be inclined to account for them 

 bj' the strain of needlework on the eyes of girls. 

 Professor W. Smith, in a note appended to the 

 Board's return, states that he had seen Mr. E. 

 Clark, surgeon to the London Ophthalmic Hos- 

 pital, in connection with the results, and they 

 agreed that a similar return should be made of 

 the available figures for near vision ; that the 

 figures were most interesting and valuable as 

 giving the first experience on a large scale of 

 the extent of defect of vision amongst children 

 of school age ; and that the figures showed that 

 rather more than a fourth of the children suf- 

 fered from defective vision. The London 

 School Board proposes to repeat the test, year 

 by year, in order to secure a correct record 

 being kept of the progressive improvement, or 

 the reverse, in the children's power of distant 

 vision. 



PROTECTION OF WILD ANIMALS IN AFRICA. 



The London Times has received the following 

 letter, dated May 10th, from a correspondent 

 at Beira, East Africa : 



I venture to bring before your notice the 

 pressing danger that before long the districts 



