Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 April 1885 — The Near-Sighted Ones. [ARTICLE]

The Near-Sighted Ones.

As to how one becomes near-sighted, M. pjtfoej observes, first, that “Antiquity does not seem to have known what this defect was. You know,” he says, “of wh t enormous dimensions the Greek and Boman theaters and circusses were. Thirty thousand spectators could sit with ease in them. None of them ever had or felt the want of opera glasses. I imagine that it was with the ancients as it was with the sailors of the presentday. Accustomed, from father to son, to look at objects at a distance, never reading, and letting sleep repose their eyes as soon as tho sun sets, they acquire that sort of piercing sight that Fenimore Cooper likes to endow his savage Indians with.” In the present day, M. Sarcey continues, men w; ar their eye-sight out in the day-time by excessive reading and writing, and in the nighttime by gas-light and over heated atmo3 phere. The proportion of shortsighted people, according to the celebrated occulist, M. Perrin, whom M. Sarcey cites, has increased in the large government schools from 30 to 50 per cent, in fifteen years. And in Germany, it appears, matters are still worse, because the Germans read more than we do, and their Gothic type is still more fatiguing for the eyes than ara Boman characters. M. Sarcey warns his readers against believing in two popular errors in respect to short sight. The first, that such sight re«j mains stronger than the normal as one advances in years; and in the second, that it is wrong to wear glasses for this defect. Both of these assertions he declares to be absolutely false.