An appendix to Mr. Ware’s paper on vision

The author remarks, that Mr. Ware’s observations with regard to short-sightedness, being in general merely the consequence of habit acquired at an early age, is conformable with his own experience in general, and that he himself is a particular instance of natural long-sightedness gradually converted into confirmed short sight. He very well remembers first learning to read, at the common age of four or five years, and that at that time he could see the usual inscriptions across a wide church; but that at the age of nine or ten years he could no longer distinguish the same letters at the same distance, without the assistance of a watch-glass, which has the effect of one slightly concave. In a few years more the same glass was not sufficiently powerful; but yet his degree of short-sightedness was so inconsiderable, that he yielded to the dissuasion of his friends from using the common concave glasses till he was upwards of thirty years of age, when No. 2 was barely sufficient; and he very shortly had recourse to No. 3. In the course of a few years an increase of the defect rendered it necessary for him to employ glasses still deeper, and his sight soon required No. 5, where it has remained stationary to the present time. From the progress which Sir Charles Blagden has observed in his own short-sightedness, he is of opinion that it would have been accelerated by an earlier use of concave glasses, and might have been retarded, or perhaps prevented altogether, by attention to read and write with his book or paper as far distant as might be from his eyes. In this communication he takes the same opportunity of adding an experiment made many years since on the subject of vision, with a view to decide how far the similarity of the images received by the two eyes contribute to the impression made on the mind, that they arise from only one object. In the house where he then resided, was a marble surface ornamented with fluting, in alternate ridges and concavities. When his eyes were directed to these, at the distance of nine inches, they could be seen with perfect distinctness. When the optic axes were directed to a point at some distance behind, the ridges seen by one eye became confounded with the impression of concavities made upon the other, and occasioned the uneasy sensation usual in squinting. But when the eyes were directed to a point still more distant, the impression of one ridge on the right eye corresponded with that made with an adjacent ridge upon the left eye, so that the fluting then appeared distinct and single as at first, but the object appeared at double its real distance, and apparently magnified in that proportion. Though the different parts of the fluting were of the same form, their colours were not exactly alike, and this occasioned some degree of confusion when attention was paid to this degree of dissimilarity.