Animal mechanism : the eye / by Jerome V.C. Smith.

  • Smith, Jerome Van Crowninshield, 1800-1879.
Date:
[1831]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Animal mechanism : the eye / by Jerome V.C. Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    SCIENTIFIC TRACTS. NUMBER V. ANIMAL MECHANISM. THE EY E. BY JEROME V. C. SMITH, M. D. | A variety of professional works are already before the public on the anatomy of the eye, but it is questionable whether any of them are sufficiently divested of technical language, to be of utility to that class of readers who are only interested in the beauties of science. Without making pretensions to originality, the writer of the following pages will endeavor to simplify a subject, too generally considered abstruse, that it may be under- stood by those who have neither patience, time, nor in- clination to pursue it under the guidance of a public instructed Well acquainted, as anatomists are, with the minute organization of the eye, no one has been able to explain how or wfoj we see. Although the visual organs are constructed with such exact reference to the laws of light, that telescopes and microscopes, made upon truly philo- sophical principles, are but imitations or modifications of the apparatus of the human eye, —there is still a differ- ence between the animate and inanimate, the most wonderful and astonishing. The first is a perceiving in- strument; the second, a receiving The eye can only perform its destined functions, in connexion with a living system, regulated by an existing harmony of all its complex machinery, consisting of nerves blood vessels and brain. However perfect in its several' tunics the eye may be, or transparent m its fluids,