ent, he took hold of my
hand at different distances, mentioning whether it was brought
nearer to or carried farther from him, and conveying his hand to
mine in a circular direction, that we [Ware and another
physician] might be the better satisfied of the accuracy with
which he did it." In this case, as in others of like nature,
Ware could not, "although the patients had certainly been blind
from early infancy," satisfy himself "that they had not, before
this period, enjoyed a sufficient degree of sight to impress the
image of visible objects on their minds, and to give them ideas
which could not afterward be entirely obliterated."

Ware found, moreover, that, in the case of two children between seven
and eight years of age, both blind from birth, and on whom no operation
had been performed, the knowledge of colors, limited as it was, was
sufficient to enable them to tell whether colored objects were brought
nearer to or carried farther from them; for instance, whether they were
at the distance of two inches or four inches from their eyes; and he
himself observes that they were not, in strictness of speech, blind,
though they were deprived of all useful sight.

Remarks on the Second and Third Cases.

It is a surprising thing, in the account of the former case, that
nothing whatever is said of the behavior of the patient on the first and
on the fourth day after the operation. We must assume that he passed the
first day wholly with his eyes bandaged. Further, the boy pointed out
four corners of a box, while the box had eight; yet no inference can be
drawn from this, for possibly only one side of the box was shown to him.
The most remarkable thing is the statement of the patient that he saw
the _shadow_ of his hand in the glass. This circumstance, and the
astonishing certainty, at the very first attempts to estimate
space-relations, in the discrimination of round and angular, and in the
observation that the table was somewhat farther from him than he could
reach, show what influence the mere ability to perceive colors has upon
vision in space. Before the operation, W. distinguished only striking
colors from one another; but he could perceive nearness and distance of
colored objects, within narrow limits, by the great differences in the
luminous intensity of the colors. He distinguished with certainty
dimness from brightness. Accordingly, when he noticed a decrease in the
brightnes