14th Jan, THE question of eyesight is one of the most important physiological problems, not only for the doctor, but also for all who have anything to do with bringing up children, That there has long been a steady deterioration seems to be demonstrated beyond all doubt. It is part ofthe price we have to pay for the unnatural lives forced upon us by modern civilisation that we should little by little lose those powers upon which in the savage state human life depends. The true savage whose sight or hearing, instinct or physical power had fallen much below the average rarely remained long to be a burden to himself or anybody else.
But since man has made himself. what he is, a creature of high-strung sical faculties, his five senses Rave nerves and comparatively low pbyundergone corresponding changes. That these changes are not all for the worse may be put as much to the credit of civilisation as the undoubted instances of degradation must be to its debit. The senses that have lost ground are sight and hearing. Of course it may be argued that since man has been freed from the dangers of savage life there has not been the same necessity for his sight and hearing to be acute. This may at once be granted without abating one jot our regret for our loss. For thotigh a man's life in these days rarely depass on the keenness of his sight is livelihood not unfrequently does, and between life and livelihood the connection is sometimes so close as te make the two almost identical. "You take my life," says Shylock, "When you do take the means whereby live."
Hearing, though much less keen, is perhaps more discriminating musically, so much more so in Bot that there are ears delicate enough to be almost a curse at times. Sight too may have developed in certain ways, since it has been gravely argued from the absence of all reference to the colour of the sky in our oldest classics, Homer, the Bible, and the Hindoo Scriptures, that their writers were blue-blind.
Be that as it may it cannot be denied, that there are a much higher percentage of children with defective vision in these days than was formerly the case. It is but necessary to look about amongst the families of one's friends to see this, and enquiry amongst teachers bears out the observation thus made. In fact the attention of the educational world has been so forcibly called to the growing defects in sight that special means are being taken to remedy, 80 far as may be possible, the serious state of affairs obtaining. Type, tint of paper, and colour of ink' used in printing are all being attended to with the most scrupulous care by up-to-date publishers. Especially for little children are the resources of the typographer being brought into play. The wretchedly cramped type of our childhood is fast giving place to large lettering, wide spacing and clear arrangement. The old-fashioned woodcuts, whose resem-blanco to life was often a very doubtfal quantity, are replaced by process pictures and the very best of colour printing. In this respect we are told American school-books are second to none, if in fact they do not take the lead. We are also informed by Mr. Lanning that he has recently received specimen books from England that have been got up specially with a view to sight preservation. The paper is of a rich cream colour, while the ink both for print and illustrations is green. It is claimed for this arrangement that it gets rid of the violent contrast so harmful to the eyes, between the dazzling white of modern papers and the intense black of the ink.
Without statistics it is not possible to say whether the children growing up here do or do not suffer more from defective vision than their contemporaries at home, but we think it most likely that they do, and parents cannot be too solicitous on this point. Defective sight in childhood sometimes rectifies itself, but that is no reason why the temporary relief so much needed should not be given, and there are juvenile defects which neglect intensifies, in which case neglect becomes most culpable.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.