180 Idle Days in Patagonia. 
effect of physical conditions: thus, the inhabitants 
of mountainous districts and of dry elevated table- 
lands may have a better sight than dwellers in low, 
humid, and level regions, although just the reverse 
may be the case. Among European nations the 
Germans are generally supposed to have weak 
eyes, Owing, some imagine, to their excessive in- 
dulgence in tobacco; while others attribute the 
supposed decay to the form of type used in their 
books, which requires closer looking 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 probably the 
decadence has been a great deal exaggerated. 
Animals living in darkness become near-sighted, 
and then nearer-sighted still, and so on progres- 
sively 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 
