THE EFFECTS OF SHORT-SIGHT.
WE have received a pamphlet by Dr. E. G. Loring, of New York, apparently an oculist, and judging by the attention which his views have excited, a man of some local professional standing. He maintains that the world is becoming Short-sighted; that Myopia, as it is technically called, is developed by educa- tion, and especially by reading ; that the disease or defect is partially hereditary, and that as education spreads, the inclina- tion to short-sightedness must spread also, until it may become nearly or quite universal among the cultivated classes of Western mankind. He endeavours to prove his proposition by quantities of American statistics, which seem to show that defective sight increases in the precise ratio of study, and by quoting the often repeated fact that in some Universities in Germany the average of " myopia " rises with age, till at twenty-one there are twice or three times as many near-sighted lads as boys with normal eyes—a state- ment endorsed in this week's Nature—and finally alarms himself and his readers till he and they half doubt whether cultivation is not being purchased at too high a price. What is the use of knowing so much, if you are to be purblind ? We confess we think his views somewhat exaggerated. Knowing, as we do, that out of half-a-dozen children in a family, one or two will be near- sighted and the rest enjoy normal sight ; that short-sight some- times appears like an epidemic among the children of long-sighted parents; and that near-sighted parents frequently have far-sighted children, we own to a distrust of the theory of heredity, all the greater because the permanent tendency in all animals towards reversion to the normal type would tend to extinguish a mere disease or failure of normal power. We know that the Chinese habit of spoiling the foot has not injured the feet of any new-born baby, and that—as Dr. Loring admits—the Jewish and Arabian practice of circumcision, though continued for 3,000 years, has produced no change of structure, and doubt, therefore, if the too great convexity of the eye, if produced artificially, is certainly transmissible from one generation to another. The evidence, too, as to the effect of education is a little dubious. Thousands of students are keen-eyed. The proportion of out- door labourers suffering under the defect is considerable, though concealed by their habit of refusing spectacles ; and we have no proof that savage races are exempt from the disease, the only tribes carefully examined being at once few in number, and dependent for food upon their cultivation of the sense of sight. In their case it would be necessary to inquire not only into the number of normal eyes among them, but into the number of abnormal eyes in the direction of long-sightedness, the incessant effort to see at long ranges improving all sight,—Red Indians, for instance, see foot-prints in grass which are quite invisible to civi- lised white men. The short-sighted savage may see as far as the doctor who examines him, without having his own normal sight. Nor do we quite understand why, if the eye is made convex by atten- tion to books, it does not go on getting more convex by still more attention to them ; or how it is possible, as occasionally happens, that students of fifty, after forty years passed in reading, more or less, should find their eyes so strengthened that they can dispense with glasses. We incline rather to a notion which underlies Dr. Liebreich's inventions in the way of desks,—that the position of the frame in reference to the object studied has as much to do with myopia as the use of the eye ; and that the disease, if hereditary, is only so as a hereditary tendency liable to exasperation. Never- theless, whatever the precise cause, it is impossible to doubt that near-sightedness is becoming much more common. The number of men in spectacles grows larger every day, while that of women increases, until it is only explicable on the theory that the increase has been accompanied by some very sudden dis7
appearance of the feminine dislike to wearing glasses. It is conceivable, at all events, that study is one great cause, and that as study becomes universal the tendency towards disease, being increased by the constant intermarriage of the near-sighted, should become more general, and that at last near-sightedness should become in the Western world the rule, and the normal eye, which can read the Times' editorial type at sixteen inches distance—the inches being measured straight from paper to eyeball—the exception.
It is a curious speculation to think out the change which such universal near-sightedness would work in the minds and habits of the civilised races. To begin with a rather bizarre, yet not absurd suggestion, a wide increase of myopia might make the wearing of spectacles universal, their absence becoming a marked and, as it were, a slightly immodest peculiarity. The gaze of the uncovered eye would be pronounced a stare, and timid or refined people would assert that they did not quite under- stand why Dickens had thought Mrs. Hominy so ridiculous for wincing, strong-minded woman as she was, under a reference to the vision of "the naked eye." Readers will think our sugges- tion rather grotesque, but those who live with the short-sighted will tell them it is not so ; that they become accustomed to regard spectacles as parts of the face, and that they are slightly offended, or as it were shocked, when those they love appear suddenly without them. That feeling would deepen rapidly in presence of a national habit, until in a -very few years it would become imperative on all decent persons to wear glasses, whether they wanted them or not, and their accidental absence from breakage or otherwise would be concealed as carefully and with as much inner annoyance as a collapse in a man's braces or a tear in the gathers of a lady's gown. Then the standards of taste would alter, slovily, but decidedly. We submit to the general judgment of the myopes, but we think they will find, if they ask themselves carefully, that they like the objects they admire to be more distinct than long-sighted people do ; that they prefer general effects to details, unless the details are minute enough and near enough to call their unusual clearness of vision into play ; that they like bright colours, and that they have quite an exceptional affection for whole colours, wide expanses of a single tint which give them no trouble to separate. In scenery, they prefer bold outlines to minute tracery, love the mountains better than the fat plain, with its wealth of details, and appreciate sketchy landscapes with a definite effect rather than painters like Crome or Morland, with their almost microscopic touches in the way of bark, and foliage, and the glint of light on either. As to beauty there is not much change, save this, that they do not quite appreciate, because they do not quite see, firmness of outline as the long-sighted do ; and are less sensi- tive to the charm of smoothness, everything that is level appearing to them more or less smooth. Indeed we have noticed, more especially among short-sighted women, a distinct tendency to test smoothness by the touch of the fingers, as the blind do, a tendency existing in the whole race, but more restrained among those of normal sight. [We saw an Alderman once examine the paint of a landscape worth a thousand guineas in that way, the owner all the while looking on, choking with politeness and almost audible irritation.] If this is correct, in a generation or two this unconscious inability to perceive distant detail would affect all art. Everything, in fact, intended to be admired would become a little larger, a little more definite, a little more rough in execution, and taste would proportionately de- teriorate. For the same reason, all stage effects would be heightened and coarsened, the special crave of the short-sighted for ample light would be gratified, and the present tendency to carelessness about the finer by-play and more refined pantomime would be rapidly intensified. The artist would reckon on much being missed through defect of sight.
It is, however, of the mental result that we rather wished to speak, and in touching on this we enter on more disputable ground. It is our conviction that the short-sighted, allowing, of course, for the endless differences of individual character, are slightly more shy—or by reaction from shyness, more audacious —slightly more indifferent to giving pain in society, and decid- edly more suspicious and attentive than the long-sighted. They do not completely and constantly see the faces, and more especially the unaccustomed faces, about them, and so lose much of the education which the long-sighted obtain from their unconscious study of expression. They do not see, or are not sure that they see, the half-smile whether of contempt, or pardon, or tolerance, which is in the world so strong an educating influence ; are blind to the air of resignation produced by tediousness ; miss half the
force of the flash of an interlocutor's eye, and do not feel exactly certain whether his colour has risen or a shadow has fallen across his cheek. In half-lights, which all myopes detest, till the very meaning of the poets' praise of twilight is lost on them, this difficulty is intensified, and throughout life they are reduced to more careful listening to the inflections of the voice, to more attentive observation of attitude, to more of the intentness which indicates suspicion than their neighbours,—an intent- ness which sometimes developes what at first it only seemed to indicate. That the short-sighted are more timid than the long-sighted, we should not assert. On the contrary, they are sometimes more audacious, because less percipient of danger ; but we think we have noticed that they are more cautious, that they have a habitual and slightly exaggerated want of re- liance on their eyes, and that in presence of some dangers—for instance, snowballs or stones thrown at them—they never forget that they have spectacles before their eyes, and guard them with an instinctive care which the long-sighted do not feel to be a necessity. Indeed, we have an impression that spectacles worn all day and every day through life become gradually to a man's own consciousness part of himself, and that he gradually developes an instinct about them akin to that of some polypi about their tentacles, and protects them, as be winks in the glare, automatically. Defect from normal sight implies, in fact, imperfection in a quality ; and there can be no imperfection which does not deteriorate, though of course it may also and con- stantly does stimulate and develope other and compensating qualities. The man of shortened vision is a man in that respect a little smaller than his neighbours. In reparation, the ear grows more acute, the habit of attention is strengthened, and the nervous instinct we call perceptiveness probably becomes more lively or more painful. The short-sighted are rarely, though that may arise from reasons unconnected with sight, the obtuse. If short-sight became universal, the short-sighted nation would, we conceive, gain in caution, in student habit, and in attentiveness, but would lose still more in largeness of nature, in boyishness of habit, and in ease and free- dom of social intercourse. Believing that departures from any normal type are always temporary, we do not expect to see any such nation ; but many oculists do, and they add curiously enough that the first people so affected will be the German, which appeared to the Romans so complete a type of physical perfection.
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