class of all. There are four thousand of up in their stead. They are wrong because them, and they must have a police permit they are unjust and insufficient; because for their trade. They guard their "walks" men who work ought not to need charity; as jealously as monarchs guard their empires, and wo to the rag-fox who should prowl out of bounds! They live chiefly on what they pick up-on vegetables found by the gardens of the surburbs, and on fish and meat cast out of the market-stalls. They smoke the half-consumed cigars found in the streets, and they drink water flavoured with vinegar. They are a wretched, destitute, socially degraded class, and the sooner a good system of drainage swept them out of Paris the better. because almsgiving to those who by nature and right ought to be independent of all but their own industry, is in itself an engine of demoralization and the confession of a social wrong. The low rate of wages, the low range of education, the non-recognition of the divine truths that labour has the right to its full reward, and that men have the right to labour, the setting up of present social conditions as of unchangeable force, and the preferring to continue a natural crime rather than disturb artificial arrangements-these are the real causes of our preFrom the large mass of evidence collected sent evils; and until we have courage to atby M. Le Play but one conclusion can be tack them boldly, we shall see no amelioradrawn; that, from some cause or causes, tion. We cannot return to the effete systhe whole of the western working world is tems of serfdom, patronage, close guilds, in a painfully unjust and disjointed condi- and other forms of dependence on the one tion. We may differ from our author as hand, and of power on the other. The to the causes of that condition; we may workman is now free, and will not allow differ still more as to their remedy; but we the chains he has shaken off to be laid on cannot deny the fact, that such a state of his strong right hand again. Our only rethings exists as is discreditable to our civili-medy now is to raise his social and intelsation, and a practical disproof of our Christ lectual condition into parity with its politicianity. The eastern and northern artisans, al importance, and to make him worthy to with whom is neither enterprise nor ambi- exercise the influence which belongs to him tion, neither extended commerce nor indivi- by right. We ought not to have said "to dual liberty, are far better off for all material raise him," but rather to give him space and comforts than our own, in the heart of our power to raise himself. For though much rich, free, powerful countries. Seeing this, is talked of the perfect political freedom-if M. de La Play finds it the shortest way to not always political power-of every man in lay the blame of his indigence on the liberty England, we all know what stringency our of the workman; partly under cover of de- social laws possess, and how difficult it is siring to see a more friendly hand extended for any man to overcome the prejudices or to him by his master, partly with the ex- the fashions of the day. The workman is pressed opinion that the liberty of the peo- not yet recognised in his true and distinctple tends to the evil of a nation. In a word, ive class, as, in the birth-hour of the old he would throw society back into its past burgher class, he to-day, as they then, is conditions, and restore the systems proved met by the full resistance of all existing by experience to be insufficient. He makes prejudices. When he shall have overcome the pauperization of the lower classes in these, he will have found his true place in the France to rest on the infinite division of world. land, on universal suffrage which gives un- We subscribe to the necessity of the due political importance and awakens un- noblest amount of self-control; yet we rehealthy political excitement, on the love of pudiate the belief of our present partial polpleasure, and on the decay of subventions or itical economists, that the subjugation of privileges. In England, it is the isolation every instinct, the denial of every natural of the people from the upper classes, public desire, can alone elevate the artisan. This charities, the poor-laws, large families," and is what justice demands should not be nesensuality, that he takes as the concrete cessary; the free full life, under proper recause of all our ill. In these items he is gulations, that nature meant all men to live, right, though even then imperfect. The iso- is what we claim for the artisan as for the lation of the people from the upper classes aristocrat. It is not just that a man should is not to be bridged over by the condescend- deny nature in order to exist on this earth; ing kindness of patronage or by the re-es-that he who supplies the lives of others. tablishment of seigneurial rights; and cha- should himself be destitute. The enormous rities, whether supported by private dona- | power of capital is again a matter needing tions or recognised by the laws, are not to thought and regulation-for liberty must be abolished until something better is set be respected with one as with the other. But when our machinery shall have still ternal world, the form, the colour, and the further developed itself and assumed powers other properties of matter, the sense of sight undreamt of now, when men shall be able is the most important, whether we view it to go back to the same conditions, with im- in reference to the extent of its range, the proved accessories and larger powers, as value of its lessons, or the structure of its gave them honour and independence before, organs. With the senses of Touch and then we shall find that this unhealthy pre- Taste, we are brought into immediate conponderance of capital will subside, and that tact with the objects of our examination. the diffusion of power will lead to the diffu- With the organ of Smell, we inhale from a sion of wealth. Does not this phrase-tak- short distance the radiating or the floating ing it as educational, political, or social effluvia. The sound of the troubled ocean, power-contain the whole enigma? or of the gale which disturbs it, or the thunWe grieve that M. Le Play should have der which rolls above, is heard from afar : written his book, or rather have published But the eye carries us to the remotest horiit under such imposing auspices as those zon around, glances upward beyond the under which it has appeared. Containing, voiceless air, through the planetary regions as we believe, radical and dangerous error, where worlds are but stars,-through the we lament that the Government of such a sidereal zones where suns are too small to nation as France should have leant it the be seen, and to that more distant bourne colour of its sanction and adoption. The where Imagination droops her wings, and theory which France has spent so many Reason ceases to be our guide. But even years and spilled so much of her best blood in these distant realms, where the intellectto solve, has not been solved therein; no ual eye becomes dim, the human eyeball return to feudal tutelage will save the work- exerts its powers,-descrying and describing man of the nineteenth century. Onward- what is there; and if a limit has been asimproving our present material-making signed to the physical creation, it may yet machinery subservient to intelligence, not convey to the human brain the impression only to capital-the wide gulfs lying now of the remotest ray which streams from the between our various social castes bridged very verge of space. over by greater equality in education-the Our visual powers still maintain their pretrue, radical, entire elevation of the work- eminence, when we study the organizations man, not his degradation-these are our of the microscopic world, the form and only means of getting out of our present functions of atomic life, or the larger strucdifficulties; and these are the means which tures of the creations around us. The M. Le Play decries and disbelieves :-to human ear is deaf to the cry of that life uphold Russian serfdom and Austrian tutel- which we crush beneath our feet, and to the age instead. ART. IV.-1. Vision in Health and Disease; the value of Glasses for its Restoration, and the Mischief caused by their Abuse. By ALFRED SMEE, F.R.S., Surgeon to the Bank of England, &c. Lond. 1847. 8vo. Pp. 64. 2. The Eye in Health and Disease; with an Account of the Optometer for the Adaptation of Glasses for Impaired, Aged, or Defective Sight. By ALFRED SMEE, F.R.S., &c. Second Edition, to which is appended a Paper on the Stereoscope and Binocular Perspective. Lond. 1854. Pp. 99. 3. Théorie de l'Eil. Par L.L. VALLEE, Ancien Elève de l'Ecole Polytechnique, Officier de la Legion d'Honneur, &c. Paris, 1844-1846. Or all the Five Senses-the sight, the hearing, the touch, the taste, and the smell, by which we acquire our knowledge of the ex joyous sounds of the living myriads which sport in the sunbeam. The senses of Taste and Smell give us no information respecting the animalcular world; and the rude touch of man, could it reach the invisible atom, would fail to disclose either its outline or its properties. The sight alone pierces into the dwellings of animalcular life, expands the material atom into a world,-lays open the prolific cells of vegetable and animal organization, and displays to the astonished inquirer the structure of those wonderful tissues which cover the fountains of intellect. ual and animal life. Nor does the superiority of Sight to the other four senses seem less striking, when we consider what would have been the consequences had we been limited to one. A great modern poet has described a state of the world, in which "The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars But he has not ventured to conceive a world | darkness around, or whose genius and intenanted with sightless occupants, or revolv- dustry had procured new powers or new ing in space which no ray could traverse. luxuries to their race. But whatever might Were our food and our drink tasteless, and have been his advances, either in material or no fragrance breathed from the plant or the intellectual progress, the useful arts would flower, hunger and thirst would still be as- have been slowly and imperceptibly devesuaged, and the lily and the rose would de- loped, and his highest pleasures would have light the eye. Were the chords of the lyre been derived from the luxuries of music, and struck in vain, and the voice which soothes the productions which administered to the or alarms us mute for ever, the harmony of senses of Taste and Smell. colours would replace, however imperfectly, From these speculations, which, however the harmony of sounds, and the expression uninstructive, sufficiently establish the value of the human face would still utter, however and superiority of the sense of sight, we inarticulately, the language of reproof or of proceed to give some account of the organ love. Without the ear man could have held by which it carries on its operations,-of communication, and interchanged his labour, the optical changes to which it is subject, with his fellow, however distant he might of the means by which they may be corbe. Though the rattle of the iron wheel were inaudible, and the watchman deaf to the shriek of the steam-pipe, the coloured beacon would have guided him in his flight; and the pilot might have conducted his ship round the globe, though he heard not the howl of the gale which shattered his rigging, nor the roar of waters which threatened to engulf him. It is difficult to imagine the condition of a world where space is impervious to light, or man insensible to its impressions. In such an inquiry the poet might be as safe a guide as the philosopher, and we would not lose much did we rest satisfied with the general idea in the poet's exclamation, though it was not intended to convey it: "Oh what were man-a world without a sun!" Without any knowledge of the form or size of his own world, or of the worlds beyond it, like the Proteus of the subterranean lake, or the mole working in the dark, man might subsist on the spontaneous productions of the soil, plucking the fruit which he did not plant, and gathering the seed which he did not sow, but his sustenance would have been more precarious than that of the world of instinct as now placed under his power. With the cunning of his fingers, and the grasp of his hand, and the vigour of his arm, and the force of his intellect, he might have sheltered himself from the elements within walls of stone, and defended himself against enemies, rational or irrational, and equally helpless with himself. His houses might have been grouped into cities, his cities into communities, and his communities into nations. His reason might have led him to a knowledge of the great first cause, and though he had neither sun nor moon nor stars to represent the beneficence which surrounded him, he might have deified the most gifted of his race who had pierced deepest into the rected,—and of the remarkable phenomena, normal and abnormal, which the eye exhibits either by the direct action of light, or by those other agents which exercise an indirect influence over the seat of vision. In discussing these various subjects, we mean to address ourselves to the general reader,-to consider the eye simply as an optical instrument, and to avoid all questions anatomical, medical, or surgical; and we shall not gain our object if we fail in making our observations popular, and of considerable advantage to those who value their sight. While the eye surpasses all the other organs of sense in the extent of its range, it enjoys the exclusive privilege of seeing very distant objects long after they have ceased to exist. If a fixed star is destroyed, or ceases to give light, it will, according to its distance, continue visible for years or for centuries, till the last ray which it has projected has conveyed to our eye the fact of its disappearance, or of the extinction of its light. Nor are these powers of observation dependent on the magnitude of the eye-ball, or of any of its parts. The minutest eye of the minutest animal, which itself requires a microscope to make it visible, contains in the invisible image which is painted on its retina, a representation of the external world, of the earth, and of the ocean, and of the planetary and starry firmament, as distinct and as large when transferred outwardly by the laws of vision, as that which is seen by the eye of man, or by that of the elephant or of the whale. While the human eye has been admired by ordinary observers for the beauty of its form, the range and quickness of its movements, and the variety of its expression, it has excited the wonder of philosophers by the exquisite mechanism of its interior, and its singular adaptation to the number of purposes which it has to serve. The eyeball is nearly globular, being of a spheroidal form like an orange, its smallest diameter being that which we direct to objects when we wish to see them most distinctly. It moves in a socket elegantly prepared for its reception, and lubricated by a peculiar secretion, which entirely removes the friction, and consequently, the irritation with which its motions would have been otherwise accompanied. By means of six muscles attached to it, it can direct itself, without moving the head, to almost every point of a hemisphere; but when the motion of the head or body is combined with that of the eyeball, it can command almost a continuous picture-a panorama of everything around it. than before, and is placed in a thin capsule or bag immediately behind the iris; the pupil or opening of the iris being opposite the central part of the lens. The crystalline lens is a beautiful piece of mechanism, and merits a particular description. In its perfect state it is as transparent as a drop of water, and yet it consists of a great number of coats like an onion, each coat or lamina being composed of an immense number of fibres, with teeth on each side, like those of a saw, the teeth of one fibre entering into the hollows between the teeth of the adjacent fibres, so as to bind them together. These fibres, which are of equal length, taper from each end to their middle, and they are so combined that the lens is most dense in the centre, becoming less and less dense towards its circumference. In the human lens the structure of the fibres, and their arrangement, is not so distinctly seen as in the lenses of fishes and quadrupeds, and therefore we shall describe generally their structure and arrangement in these animals. In the lens of a cod, fourtenths of an inch in diameter, there were, according to the observations of the writer of this Article, who first discovered the existence of teeth in the fibres, the following number of coats, fibres, and teeth :— Fibres in each lamina or spherical coat, Teeth in each spherical coat, Teeth in each fibre, The ball of the eye, about nine-tenths of of an inch in diameter, is formed externally by a tough and opaque membrane, called the sclerotic coat, which forms the white portion. Into this coat, and in the front of the ball, and slightly raised above it, is inserted a circular transparent portion like a small watch-glass, which is called the cornea, and though as transparent as glass, it is like the sclerotic coat, so tough in its nature as to resist powerfully any external injury. It is composed of several firmly adhering layers of equal thickness, and is very nearly half an inch in diameter. Within the cornea, and in contact with it, is the aqueous humour, a transparent fluid, which has received its name from its resemblance to water. It has the form of a plano-convex lens, the convex side being the inner surface of the cornea, and the plane side the visible surface of the Iris, a flat circular membrane, with an aperture in its centre called the pupil. The colour of the eye resides in this membrane, and the pupil has the remarkable property of contracting in strong lights from one-fourth to one-eighth of an inch, and of expanding again when the light is diminish ́ed. This membrane divides the interior of the eye into two very equal parts, called the anterior and the posterior chambers. The anterior chamber, which is in front of the iris, contains the aqueous humour, and the posterior chamber, which is behind it, contains the vitreous humour and the crgstalline lens. The vitreous humour, which resembles the white of an egg, fills up a great portion of the eyeball, and keeps it in a state of dis-other. tension, resisting pressure like a bladder, or an India-rubber ball filled with water. It is contained in a capsule or bag divided into several cells or compartments, the humour occupying each cell as honey does the cells of the holey-comb. The crystalline lens occupies the front of the vitreous humour, and is suspended at its circumference by the ciliary processes fixed to the sclerotic coat. It is a double convex lens, more convex behind 2,500 12.500 31.250,000 5.000,000 62,500,000,000 Or to express the result in words, the lens of a small cod contains five millions of fibres, and sixty-two thousand five hundred million of teeth, exhibiting a specimen of mechanism which may well excite our admiration. In the cod and some other animals, the fibres terminate in two opposite poles like the meridians of a globe; but in the salmon and hare they terminate in two septa or lines oppositely situated at each pole, while in quadrupeds they terminate in three septa inclined 1200 to each other, the septa at one pole being inclined 60° to those at the Behind the vitreous humour, but not next to it, and lining the inner surface of the sclerotic, is the choroid coat, a delicate membrane, covered on its posterior surface with a black pigment, and immediately within this pigment, and close to it, is the retina, which is the innermost coat of all, next to the vitreous humour. It is a delicate reticulated membrane, consisting of several layers of different structures, the ex act nature and use of which have not been that if we take an opaque hollow hemisphere determined, although the membrane which the size of the eye, and after making a pinthey form is that which receives the images hole in front of it, replace the back of it of external objects, like the grey glass in with a piece of grey glass or oiled paper, the camera obscura. If we draw a line inverted images of all objects in front of it, through the centre of the pupil and the cen- when strongly illuminated, will be distinctly tre of the crystalline lens, it is called the painted upon the glass or paper. If we now axis of vision, or the optical axis of the eye, take the eye of an ox, of the same diameter and the point where it touches the retina is as the radius of the opaque hemisphere, and called the extremity of the axis. About pare away with a sharp knife the white one-tenth of an inch from the extremity of sclerotic coat till it becomes semi-transthis axis, in a horizontal direction, the retina parent, we shall see painted upon it inverted is slightly raised, and this is the place where images of all objects in front of it, and the optic nerve from the brain enters the having nearly the same size, though more sclerotic coat, and expands itself into the luminous and distinct, as those formed by retina. At the extremity of the axis there the pin-hole in the artificial hemisphere. is a small spot with a yellow margin, which, Let us now see how an inverted image, though called the foramen centrale, may in the human eye, is necessary to show obnot be a real opening, but merely a spot jects erect, or in their natural position. more transparent than the rest of the retina, When rays proceeding from an object enter owing to its being free from the soft pulpy the pupil of the eye, they necessarily fall in matter of which the retina is principally different directions upon the retina; but it composed. This spot, which exists only in man, monkeys, and some lizards, is from the thirtieth to the fiftieth part of an inch in diameter, and subtends an angle of about 4 degrees at the centre of the eyeball, or the centre of curvature of the retina. is a law of vision, determined experimentally, that whatever be the direction in which. the ray strikes the retina at any point, it gives us the sensation of vision in a direction perpendicular to the retina at that point. This law is called the Law of visible Direction, Before we proceed to show how vision is and enables us to explain all the phenomena performed by an eye thus constructed, we of inverted vision, and of vision with one must state three facts ascertained by experi- and two eyes, in the most perfect manner. ment. 1st, Rays of light proceed in straight In the case of the artificial eyeball, where lines and in all directions, from every point the rays always fall perpendicularly upon of visible objects, and illuminate with their the ground which receives them, the point own colour any colourless body or surface of the object from which they issue will be on which they fall; 2d, If we suppose a seen in its true place, along the very line of soldier to be dressed in a red cap, a yellow the ray; but, in the human eye, on account waiscoat, and blue trousers, rays of all these of the refraction of the lens, a ray proceeding three colours will fall upon a sheet of white from any point of an object is not referred paper held in front of him; but the paper back from the retina to the very point from will appear neither red, yellow, nor blue, which it came; but the difference is so small because every part of the paper is illumina- that we see every point of an object very ted with all the colours; 3d, But if we place nearly in its true place. Hence it follows, the soldier in the street, and opposite the that the cap of the soldier must be painted window-shutter of a dark room in which on the lower part of the retina, and will be there is a small hole, and hold a sheet of seen upwards in the direction nearly in paper a foot or two behind the hole, we shall which the ray from it struck the retina, see on the paper a picture of the soldier in- while the trousers of the soldier will be verted. The red rays from his cap will painted on the upper part of the retina, and pass through the hole, and fall upon the will be seen downwards in the direction lower part of the paper, the blue rays from nearly of the ray which came from them. his trousers will fall upon the upper part of The difficulty which has been generally exthe paper, and the yellow rays from his perienced in understanding how we see waistcoat will fall upon the middle part of the paper, thus painting a rude picture of the soldier. If the hole be so small as that made with a pin, the picture will be very distinct, though dark; but if the soldier were illuminated with the light of a bright sun, a photographic picture of him might be taken in this manner. objects erect when the pictures of them on the retina are inverted, has arisen from the erroneous notion that the mind contemplates the inverted picture. But we know nothing about the mind or its position in judging of sensations, and we must be content with the indication of the law established by experiment, that any part of an object is seen in a direction perpendicular to the portion of the |