"She had as yet acquired, by the use of her sight, but very little knowledge of any forms, and was unable to apply the information gained by this new sense, and to compare it with what she had been accustomed to acquire by her sense of touch. When, therefore, a silver pencil-case and a large key were given her to examine with her hands, she discriminated and knew each distinctly; but when they were placed on the table, side by side, though she distinguished each with her eye, yet she could not tell which was the pencil-case and which was the key.
"On the twenty-fifth day after the operation she drove in a carriage for an hour in the Regent's Park, and asked more questions, on her way there, than usual, about the objects surrounding her, such as, 'What is that?' 'It is a soldier,' she was answered. 'And that? See, see!' These were candles of various colors in a tallow-chandler's window. 'Who is that that has passed us just now?' It was a person on horseback. 'But what is that on the pavement, red?' It was some ladies who wore red shawls. On going into the park she was asked if she could guess what any of the objects were. 'Oh, yes,' she replied, 'there is the sky; that is the grass; yonder is water, and two white things,' which were two swans.
"When she left London, forty-two days after the operation, she had acquired a pretty accurate notion of colors and their different shades and names. She had not yet acquired anything like an accurate knowledge of distance or of forms, and, up to this period, she continued to be very much confused with every new object at which she looked. Neither was she yet able, without considerable difficulty and numerous fruitless trials, to direct her eye to an object; so that, when she attempted to look at anything, she turned her head in various directions, until her eye caught the object of which it was in search."
Remarks on the Sixth Case.
This case has been adduced as a proof that the sense of sight is sufficient, without aid from the sense of touch, to perceive whether an object is brought nearer the eye or carried farther from it. But John Stuart Mill rightly observes, in opposition to this ("Dissertations and Discussions," ii, 113; London, 1859), that the observation we are concerned with was not made "till the eighteenth day after the operation, by which time a middle-aged woman might well have acquired the experience necessary for distinguishing so simple a phenomenon." Besides, she was very uncertain in her judgment of distances, and, in her attempts to seize with the hand new and distant objects, she frequently acted exactly like an infant.
VII. The Franz Case.
J. C. A. Franz, of Leipsic, communicates the following to the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society" (by Sir Benjamin C. Brodie), (London, 1841; i, pp. 59-69):
"F. J. is the son of a physician. He is endowed with an excellent understanding, quick power of conception, and retentive memory. At his birth, both eyes were found to be turned inward to such an extent that a portion of the cornea was hidden by the inner canthus, and in both pupils there was a yellowish-white discoloration. That the strabismus and cataract of both eyes in this case were congenital is evident from the testimony both of the parents and of the nurse. The latter held a light before the eyes of the child when he was a few months old, of which he took no notice. I ascertained also from her that the eyeballs did not move hither and thither, but were always turned inward, and that but rarely either the one or the other was moved from the internal canthus.
"Toward the end of the second year, as was stated to me, the operation of keratonyxis was performed on the right eye, upon which a severe iritis ensued, terminating in atrophy of the eyeball. Within the next four years two similar operations were performed on the left eye without success. The color of the opacity became, however, of a clearer white, and the patient acquired a certain sensation of light, which he did not seem to have had before the operation.
"At the end of June, 1840, the patient, being then seventeen years of age, was brought to me. I found the condition of things as follows: Both eyes were so much inverted that nearly one half the cornea was hidden. The left eye he could move voluntarily outward, but not without exertion; it returned immediately inward when the influence of the will had ceased. The left eyeball was of the natural size and elasticity. The patient had not the slightest perception of light with the right eye; the stimulus of light had no effect on the pupil. The pupil of the left eye, which was not round, but drawn angularly downward and inward, did not alter in dimension with the movements of the eye nor from the stimulus of light. On examining the eye by looking straight into it through the pupil, the anterior wall of the capsule appeared opaque in its whole extent, and of a color and luster like mother-of-pearl. On looking from the temporal side in an oblique direction into the pupil, there was visible in the anterior wall of the capsule a very small perpendicular cleft of about one line and a quarter in length.