"My father destined me, from a child, for the pursuits of polite learning, which I prosecuted with such eagerness that, after I was twelve years old, I rarely retired to bed, from my lucubrations, till midnight. This was the first thing which proved pernicious to my eyes, to the natural weakness of which were added frequent headaches."
Milton went blind when comparatively a young man, and it was always to him a great grief. Galileo, the great astronomer, also went blind by overwork. It was written of him, "The noblest eye which ever nature made is darkened—an eye so privileged, and gifted with such rare powers, that it may truly be said to have seen more than the eyes of all that are gone, and to have opened the eyes of all that are to come."
When the defect of far sightedness or near sightedness exists, we have but one recourse—spectacles.
Some time ago I published, in the Medical and Surgical Reporter an article on the history of spectacles. The widespread interest which this paper created has stimulated me to continue the research, and since this article appeared I have been able to gather other additional historical data to what has been described as an invention for "poor old men when their sight grows weak."
The late Wendell Phillips, in his lecture on the "Lost Arts," speaks of the ancients having magnifying glasses. "Cicero said that he had seen the entire Iliad, which is a poem as large as the New Testament, written on a skin so that it could be rolled up in the compass of a nut shell;" it would have been impossible either to have written this, or to have read it, without the aid of a magnifying glass.
In Parma, a ring 2,000 years old is shown which once belonged to Michael Angelo. On the stone are engraved the figures of seven women. You must have the aid of a glass in order to distinguish the forms at all. Another intaglio is spoken of—the figure is that of the god Hercules; by the aid of glasses, you can distinguish the interlacing muscles and count every separate hair on the eyebrows. Mr. Phillips again speaks of a stone 20 inches long and 10 wide containing a whole treatise on mathematics, which would be perfectly illegible without glasses. Now, our author says, if we are unable to read and see these minute details without glasses, you may suppose the men who did the engraving had pretty strong spectacles.
"The Emperor Nero, who was short sighted, occupied the imperial box at the Coliseum, and, to look down into the arena, a space covering six acres, the area of the Coliseum, was obliged, as Pliny says, to look through a ring with a gem in it—no doubt a concave glass—to see more clearly the sword play of the gladiators. Again, we read of Mauritius, who stood on the promontory of his island and could sweep over the sea with an optical instrument to watch the ships of the enemy. This tells us that the telescope is not a modern invention."
Lord Kingsborough, speaking of the ancient Mexicans, says: "They were acquainted with many scientific instruments of strange invention, whether the telescope may not have been of the number is uncertain, but the thirteenth plate of Dupaix's Monuments, part second, which represents a man holding something of a similar nature to his eye, affords reason to suppose that they knew how to improve the powers of vision.
Our first positive knowledge of spectacles is gathered from the writings of Roger Bacon, who died in 1292.[3] Bacon says: "This instrument (a plano-convex glass or large segment of a sphere) is useful to old men and to those who have weak eyes, for they may see the smallest letters sufficiently magnified."
Alexander de Spina, who died in 1313, had a pair of spectacles made for himself by an optician who had the secret of their invention. De Spina was so much pleased with them that he made the invention public.