s, I found the offspring of consanguineous
marriages much affected, and while not only were many afflicted with
inflammatory conditions of the choroid and retina, their average
vision was much below the normal.

My quoting Messrs. Lang and Barrett's figures was to bring more
prominently to the notice of my hearers the fact that the eyes of
primitive man resembled the eyes of the lower mammalia and that the
natural eye as an organ of vision was hypermetropic, or far sighted,
and that civilization was the cause of the myopic or near sighted eye.
Nature always compensates in some way. I grant that the present
demands of civilization could not be filled by the far sighted eye,
but the evil which is the outgrowth of present demands does not stop
when we have reached the normal eye, but the cause once excited, the
coats of this eye continue to give way, and myopia or a near sighted
condition is the result.

Among three hundred Indians examined, I found when I got to the
Creeks, a tribe which has been semi-civilized for many years, myopia
to be the prevailing visual defect.

Without going into statistics, I am convinced from my experience that
the State must look into this subject and give our public school
system of education more attention, or we, as a people, will be known
as a "spectacled race."

Myopia or short-sightedness among the Germans is growing at a
tremendous rate. While I do not believe that the German children
perform more work than our own children, there is one cause for this
defect which has never been touched upon by writers, and that is the
shape of the head. The broad, flat face, or German type, as I would
call it, has not the deep orbit of the more narrow, sharp-featured
face of the American type. The eye of the German standing out more
prominently, and, in consequence, less protected, is thereby more
prone to grow into a near-sighted eye. One of the significant results
of hard study was recently brought to my notice by looking over the
statistics on the schools of Munich in 1889. In those schools 2,327
children suffered from defective sight, 996 boys and 1,331 girls.

Of 1,000 boys in the first or elementary class, 36 are short-sighted;
in the second, 49; in the third, 70; in the fourth, 94; in the fifth,
108; in the sixth, 104; and in the last and seventh, 108. The number
of short-sighted boys, therefore, from the first class to the seventh
increases about three-fold. In the case of girls, the inc