A treatise on the physiology and diseases of the eye : containing a new mode of curing cataract without an operation, experiments and observations on vision, also on the inflection, reflection, and colours of light together with remarks on the preservation of sight. And on spectacles, reading-glasses, &c / By John Harrison Curtis.

  • Curtis, John Harrison, 1778-approximately 1860.
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the physiology and diseases of the eye : containing a new mode of curing cataract without an operation, experiments and observations on vision, also on the inflection, reflection, and colours of light together with remarks on the preservation of sight. And on spectacles, reading-glasses, &c / By John Harrison Curtis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    smooth cartilages, and synovia to lubricate their intermediate spaces. The cellular membrane is required as a case to the whole, and to contri- bute to form the skin, which is also the organ of feeling. This body is to live in society, and to hold an intercourse with the beings around it: it must therefore have the organs of speech and hearing. It is, as I have elsewhere remarked, the ear which connects man with the moral world—the conditio sine qua non of his progres- siveness— that which distinguishes a society from a herd. Hobbes accordingly observes, that the most noble and profitable invention, of all others, is that of speech, whereby men de- clare their thoughts one to another, for mutual utility and conservation, without which there had been, amongst men, neither commonwealth nor society, any more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves.* The organ of sight also is abso- lutely necessary on a thousand occasions. Thus far, then, nothing appears to be super- fluous. But the machine is not yet complete: if the body were not continually recruited, it would soon be worn out; and therefore the fluid * Hobbes’s Leviathan.