ve been examined, from six to nine
out of thirty are found to be nearsighted, farsighted, or otherwise in
need of attention. A child is dismissed from school for obstinately
declaring that the letter between _c_ and _t_ in "cat" is an _o_; "a
pupil in her fourth school year was recently brought to me by her
teacher with the statement that she did unreasonably poor work in
reading for an intelligent and willing child;" a boy is punished for
being backward. These three cases are typical. Examinations showed that
the first child was astigmatic and not obstinate; the boy had run a pin
into one eye ten years before and destroyed its sight; while the second
girl was found to be afflicted with diplopia, and in a friendly chat
told the following story: "I very often see two words where there is
only one. When I was a very little girl I used to write every word
twice. Then I was scolded for being careless. _So I learned that I must
not say two words even when I saw them._" As Miss Alida S. Williams,
principal of Public School 33 in New York City, has in many articles
and addresses freely illustrated from school experience, the art of
seeing is acquired, not congenital, and every human being who possesses
it has learned it.

The large proportion of children suffering more or less seriously from
eye trouble has led many persons to suggest physical deterioration as
the cause. Eye specialists, however, assure us that eye troubles are
probably as old as man. Our tardiness in learning the facts regarding
these troubles is due in part to the lack, until recently, of
instruments for examining the eye and for manufacturing glasses to
correct eye defects; in part, also, to the tendency of the medical
profession, which I shall repeatedly mention, to explain disorders by
causes remote and hard to find rather than by those near at hand.

About 1870 Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's attention was called "to the marked
relief of headache, insomnia, and other reflex symptoms following the
correction of optical defects by glasses." In 1874 and 1876 he wrote
two articles that "impressed upon the general profession the grave
significance of eye strain." Since that time, "in Philadelphia at
least, no study of the rebellious cause of headache or of the obscure
nervous diseases has ever been considered complete until a careful
examination of the eyes has included them as a possible cause of the
disturbance."

The new fact, therefore, is not weak eyes or stra