Science: Face of the Future

“I even believe that in the course of countless ages the two human eyes will come closer and closer together, the bridge of the nose will further diminish and sink (just as the animal snout, ‘ man’s line of descent, has been doing for aeons of time) and finally that man’s two eyes will again become one—just one large, central, cyclopean eye. It is likely that the merely servient (left) eye will shrink away (as the pineal eye has already done) so that the right eye will become the cyclopean. Certain it is that the left eye, even today, is being used less and less continually. Man’s binocular and stereoscopic visions are being destroyed—the price he pays for his speech center. The great cyclopean eye, however, will regain stereoscopic vision by developing two maculae [spots of sharpest vision] in the one eye, just in the fashion in which many birds have stereoscopic vision in each eye now. Although the field of view will then be narrower than now the eye will probably be both microscopic and telescopic; it will be exceedingly acute for colors, for motion, and for form; and, finally, most important of all, it will probably be able to perceive as light many forms of energy which now produce in human eyes no sort or kind of perception.

“Yes, in distant centuries or millenaries man will be a Cyclops, a Polyphemus, a being with one eye only. That eye, however, will not be situated in the centre of the forehead. It will stand instead in the centre of the face. The forehead will be much higher and the face below-the-forehead much shorter, and, at the horizontal boundary between the two, in the centre of that boundary, the spot where now the bridge of the nose appears, there will stand the one great eye.”

Phi Beta Kappas, in whose learned magazine The American Scholar this description of a future face appeared this week. know Dr. Thomas Hall Shastid of Duluth. as a serious, prodigious eye specialist, lawyer, novelist, translator, editor, inventor, pacifist.* His pastime is to visit zoos with an ophthalmoscope with which he peers into the eyes of fish, birds, snakes and beasts. Doing likewise, remarks he in his Phi Beta Kappa article, “will prove an event in the lives of most scientists. Nor, strange to say, are very many animals averse to the use on their eyes of that instrument of investigation [the ophthalmoscope]. Some indeed, particularly birds, are promptly hypnotized by its light and become quite tractable, cooing and cooing with great affection during all the exploration of the interior of their eyes.”

By this means inquisitive Dr. Shastid has observed, although all the observations are not unique with him, that fish are all short-sighted “because even in the best-lighted water no eyes can see very far,” that all fish eyes are flat in front, that “fish are about all color blind” and can distinguish the colors of gay bait “only as various shades of grey, precisely as a color-blind person would.” that fish can scarcely see anything below the level of their heads, that the pupils of fish eyes are almost always round, but never oval, that fish pupils contract only a little in strong light, that fish have no eyelids and no tears.

Frogs, toads and other amphibians have tears. Many amphibians “have fair color vision, but . . . their sight is in general poor.”

Most snakes “see hardly anything except objects in motion. Most snakes are nearly deaf too, so that their knowledge of the outer world reaches them largely by way of the little forked tongue, which is probably the most wonderful tactile organ in existence.”

Birds’ eyes “are the finest and most remarkable of all the eyes on earth, being often both telescopic and microscopic. . . . Visual acuity is almost incredible, being in some instances 100 times as great as that in men. . . . Birds do not see blues and violets at all. This helps in their distance vision because the haze which hangs about distant objects and which, for our eyes, renders them more or less invisible, for birds does not exist. Birds, on the other hand, see infra-red radiations which, for us, affect only the temperature sense of the skin and not the retinas at all. . . .

“Nearly all birds have eyes on the sides of the head. Such birds, of course, can have no binocular vision. Many nevertheless possess stereoscopic vision which they get by virtue of the fact that they have two maculae … in each eye. This gives in the one eye the two pictures from two different angles which constitutes the sine qua non for stereoscopic vision.”

Primates (monkeys, apes, men) are the only creatures who have both binocular and stereoscopic vision. “Only in man, of all the mammals, does there seem to be continuous easily kept, binocular and stereoscopic vision. Even in the human child, however, the eyes do not as a rule move in perfect unison with each other till about three months after birth, because stereoscopic vision, in the history of life on this planet, is an extremely recent appearance. The same fact explains the ready loss-of-binocularity (cross-eyes) in many persons as the result of optical errors (eye-strain). … I should add that the eye-grounds of all monkeys and apes are almost exactly the same as those of the black race of mankind.”

Few animals other than primates have their eyes in the front of their faces (the young human fetus also has its eyes at the sides of its head). Because their visual fields do not overlap, they do not have binocular vision. The visual fields of hares and rabbits overlap behind their narrow heads, an essential for such hunted creatures. But they do not have stereoscopic vision. Their brains are insufficiently developed for that refinement.

Other eye facts of non-primates: nearly all hoofed animals have horizontal openings for pupils, to see where they graze. Pupils of cats (tree-hunters) contract vertically. But lions, which are cats, have round pupils. Inside the eyes of cats, dogs and other hunters is a tapetum lncidum (shining carpet) which reflects light well, enables them to see better in the dark than humans. Primitive man “was eater by day, eaten by night. And this is one reason why human children, even to the present moment, dread the dark instinctively and often terribly. It is also the reason why, for long ages, the human race lived, by night, in caves or in lake dwellings.” Horses can see almost nothing above their heads because the lower part of the equine eye is practically blind. The upper part has a tapetum which emits a bluish scintillation and enables a horse to travel well in the dark. In humans a similar reflecting tapetum has degenerated and reflects little light.

Prodigious Dr. Shastid says the human eye was evolved to look at distant objects. In the last three generations, he reasons, “book education has become almost universal. . . . [Man] reads, writes, repairs watches, cuts gems, examines pictures, and so forth. Nature has sought valiantly, in two very different ways, one bad, one good, to help his eyes adjust themselves to the new set of conditions. The bad way has been to make him nearsighted. The near-sighted eye is at rest when looking at near objects, but always it is a diseased eye. . . . The good method used by nature to help man in his modern conditions of existence has been the strengthening of his focusing apparatus for near points: chiefly, that is the improvement of the elasticity of the lens.”

*Founder-president of “Give the People Their Own War Power Inc.”; inventor of eye, ear, nose and throat instruments; contributor, translator (French, German, Latin, Greek), collaborator and editor of eye texts and journals. and of medical biographies: author of The Duke of Duluth, Simon of Cyrcnc; onetime associate editor of the Michigan Law Review; fellow of the American Medical Association. American College of Physicians, American College of Surgeons.