A boy is often easily surprized by a playmate who approaches him stealthily from behind, but did you ever try the same game with a butterfly? I have, many a time. After getting cautiously so near to a butterfly at rest as to be able to distinguish between its head and its hinder extremity, I have quietly circled round it so as to approach it from behind, being at the time under the impression that it wouldn’t see me under those circumstances. But not the slightest advantage did I derive from this stratagem, for the position and construction of its eyes enabled it to see almost all ways at once.—W. Furneaux, “Butterflies and Moths.”
(2849)
Many insects have a great number of eyes, because the orb of the eye is fixt; there is, therefore, placed over the eye a multiple lens which conducts light to the eye from every direction; so that the insect can see with a fixt eye as readily as it could have done with a movable one. As many as 1,400 eyes, or inlets of light, have been counted in the head of a drone bee. The spider has eight eyes, mounted on different parts of the head; two in front, two in the top of the head, and two on each side.
One mark of the well-balanced man is the ability to see in all directions.
(2850)
SEEING, THE ART OF
I once spent a summer day at the mountain home of a well-known literary woman and editor. She lamented the absence of birds about her house. I named a half-dozen or more I had heard in her trees within an hour—the indigo-bird, the purple finch, the yellow-bird, the veery thrush, the red-eyed vireo, the song sparrow.
“Do you mean to say you have seen or heard all these birds while sitting here on my porch?” she inquired.
“I really have,” I said.