Sight in Savages. C71 
happens to be a pretty close resemblance in several 
of them, as in the case of my gambling friend’s half- 
a-dozen sparrows, which, like snowflakes, were 
‘« seen rather than distinguished,” this indistinctness 
of their images on the eye and the mind causes 
them all to appear alike. We have, as it were, two 
visions—one to which all objects appear vividly 
and close to us, and are permanently photographed 
on the mind; the other which sees things at a dis- 
tance, and with that indistinctness of outline and 
uniformity of colour which distance gives. 
In this place I had proposed to draw on my La 
Plata note-books for some amusing illustrations of 
this fact of our two sights ; but it is not necessary 
to go so far afield for illustrations, or to insist on a 
thing so familiar. “The shepherd knows his 
sheep,” is a saying just as true of this country—of 
Scotland, at all events—as of the far East. Detec- 
tives, also military men who take an interest in 
their profession, see faces more sharply than most 
people, and remember them as distinctly as others 
remember the faces of a very limited number of 
individuals—of those they love or fear or constantly 
associate with. Sailors see atmospheric changes 
which are not apparent to others; and, in like 
manner, the physician detects the signs of malady 
in faces which to the uninstructed vision seem 
healthy enough. And so on through the whole 
range of professions and pursuits which men have; 
each person inhabits a little world of his own, as it 
were, which to others is only part of the distant 
