REVIEWS. 
175 
ON SPECTACLES.* 
F was good that Scheffler s excellent treatise should have been translated 
into English, hut it was better that it should have fallen into such 
thoroughly competent hands as those of Mr. R. B. Carter. A really reliable 
work on the condition under which spectacles should be selected was much 
required, and such a work is that now before us. It is true that the 
general handbooks of ophthalmic surgery contain directions for the choice of 
spectacles, but in nearly all cases these are of an empirical kind, devoid 
of exactness, and dealing with a tew only of the potential cases of refractive 
anomaly. Perhaps it is not too much to say of some of these practical in- 
structions, that they are totally and manifestly unsound. Scheffler has en- 
deavoured to base a series of rules for the choice of spectacles on purely 
optical data, and we have no doubt that the consequences to medical science 
will be beneficial and numerous. This has been done especially for the 
English translation, which thus contains about seventy pages more than 
the German edition. One of the novelties in this volume is the elaborate 
account of the principles involved in the use of the orthoscopic spectacle- 
glasses, which are in some measure a combination of lens and prism. 
These were first suggested by Giraud-Teulon, but were not thoroughly 
worked out till Dr. Scheffler took the subject in hand. This book seems at 
first a little difficult to grasp ; but if readers will only strictly attend to the 
simple laws of refraction, we see no reason why any thoughtful person 
should find the principles laid down at all unintelligible. At all events, it 
is no fault of Mr. Carter’s if they do, for he has rendered the text as simple 
and as clear as was possible by his notes and explanatory remarks. 
PREGLACIAL MAN.f 
OTUDENTS of prehistoric archaeology will be disappointed if they expect 
^ to find anything to interest them in this work. The author, Mr. 
Moore, has put together, in the most irrational and confused fashion, the 
remarkable discoveries of geologists and physicists, with a view to show that 
the stone-record exactly corresponds with the Mosaic one as it is translated 
into English in the Bible. We must say that we cordially detest effusions of 
this kind, in which a little superficial scientific knowledge is united to a 
special pleading ingenuity. They are as painful to the really scientific man 
in search of religious truth as they are confounding to the general public 
and injurious to the best interests of theology. They serve no useful purpose, 
for they distort scientific fact, and they induce a most pernicious system of 
reasoning, compounded of the influence of extreme scepticism and equally 
* The Theory of Ocular Defects, and of Spectacles.” Translated from 
the German of Dr. Hermann Scheffler. By Robert B. Carter, F.R.C.S. 
London : Longmans, 1869. : 
t ‘‘ Preglacial Man, or Geological Chronology.” By J. Scott Moore. 
Dublin : Hodges and Smith, 1868. 
VOL. VIII. — ^’0. XXXI. N 
